We Dance review

Dancing games have had a bit of a revival lately thanks to Nintendo reinventing motion control and then Microsoft and Sony reinventing that reinvention once again with the Kinect and the Move. Following me so far? Good. 505 Games’ Zumba Fitness is of course the current goliath of dancing games but that isn’t stopping other companies such as Nordic Games also trying to grab a slice of the dancing pie.

We Dance lets you dance along to 40 songs, all with fully choreographed dance moves and you can play it in one of three ways. You can play it with just a controller where it uses the accelerometer inside to work out what you’re doing, with just the dancemat accessory and finally with a combination of the two. The problem comes down to the fact that any way you try to use it, it may just not be right for you. Using just the Wii Remote and isn’t all that accurate and you can get good scores just from shaking the thing at the right time which makes the ‘easy’ way to play it just far too easy. Using the ‘medium’ setup allows you to use a dancemat DDR style which surprises me as I thought we’d seen the end of the dancemat ironically when the Wii itself came out. This one’s slightly more complicated as it has eight places to put your feet instead of four, making it all the more complicated. It’s also super tricky to pull off the moves as the choreographed dances on screen don’t always necessarily match where you should step on the mat. Finally, there’s using the combination of the two and this is where things get really tricky. Even if Michael Jackson were alive today he’d find it very, very hard to co-ordinate what he was doing.

Thankfully, the track listing is good so if you fancy dancing about and being rated to such top tracks by Baby D, Axwell, Fatboy Slim, Pendulum and Basshunter then you’re well catered for. Slightly more cringe-worthy are tracks by Jive Bunny, Barry Manilow and Blue - oh well, we can’t all have the same taste in music can we?

If you really love dancing games and wish to extend your list of tracks and maybe have crack at a four player session if you have the room in your lounge then you may wish to give We Dance a look. If you have the Kinect though as well as a Wii, I find it hard to recommend over any of dancing game that doesn’t mean you have to hold anything in your hand or step on a squishy plastic mat. We Dance gets an average 5 out of 10.

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Related: Dance games, SingStar Dance review