Just Dance 3 Review

If, like me, you have the music tastes of the average 13-year-old girl, you'll no doubt be aware of the dramatic reformation of Steps, the formation-dancing pop troupe of late nineties/early noughties cheese fame.

The dancing game genre has also recently found its second wind in the shape - and shapes - of the original Just Dance's breakaway success. This after the DDR dance mat revolution (also of the late nineties/early noughties) had largely faded away into bargain-bin oblivion.

Mats were out, Wii was the new stage, and Ubisoft seized the moment to unleash its own formation-dancing neon sugar-rush of pure pop gaming. Arriving now on Kinect (a PlayStation Move version is due in December), millions of sales later, the genre theoretically and theatrically reaches its logical conclusion, shorn of all that is inessential. Everything, in other words, but the moves and the music.

Just Dance is not an experience to over-analyse, it's one to embrace without prejudice or dignity. Just Dance 3's song list is the biggest, broadest, poppiest and silliest of the series, a multi-genre, decades-spanning hit parade of humiliation. It's not difficult to establish whether it's your sort of thing or not.

Songs are divided up between those for one, two or four dancers. Very obviously, the more of you there are involved, the more fun it is, with the game's preposterous group highlight surely Danny Elfman's This Is Halloween. I won't spoil it for you.

From the pulsating synth-pop of 2 Unlimited's No Limit to an inexplicable undersea ballroom sway-a-long to Robbie and Nicole's take on Somethin' Stupid, this is the video game equivalent of a hen night or a Pride march. It's a wonder Ubisoft didn't bundle the game with a bottle of poppers.

Just Dance 3's main competition on Kinect is the formidable Dance Central. Dance Central - with a sequel imminent - offers the deeper, more accurate, technically more accomplished 'dance experience'. It's much more of a 'proper game' in the way it scores you and tracks you and encourages competition. But that's not to say it's necessarily more fun.

Just Dance 3 doesn't takes itself seriously and nor should you. Once the critical part of the brain is activated, it's painfully easy to pick holes in the mechanics of the experience, where it falls short of Dance Central's cool professionalism. But this is a game greater than the sum of its parts. And the main parts that need to matter at a Just Dance party are the moves and the tunes.

Bitter experience of multi-format releases where there's a Kinect instalment made me fear for Just Dance's fortunes before the uncertain gaze of Microsoft's elaborate webcam.

To my surprise, in-game, it actually works rather well. How closely and accurately it tracks the body is hard to say, and a point not worth labouring in any case. It works well enough that I feel it rewards and punishes my performances appropriately. Similarly, the game also manages somehow to track four bodies - a compelling feature when Dance Central 2 only supports two.

The downside to this superficial success is that you don't get any useful feedback on where you're going wrong. And the choreography symbols themselves are often so unhelpfully opaque that you're better off just learning from the virtual dancer.

The downside to this superficial success is that you don't get any useful feedback on where you're going wrong. And the choreography symbols themselves are often so unhelpfully opaque that you're better off just learning from the virtual dancer.

It would somewhat miss the point to criticise Kinect's accuracy here; Just Dance, as the name rather suggests, makes no real pretence of being a serious dancing simulation. But it's fair game for the rest of the experience. And, sadly, as with so many other titles for Microsoft's gadget, navigation is often an awkward faff that leaves you craving the reassuring certainty of a physical controller.

To its credit, Ubisoft has at least eschewed the tedious hold-and-wait system stubbornly favoured by Microsoft. Instead, the studio has tried to take a leaf out of Harmonix's book, aping the slick select-and-swipe mechanic of Dance Central.

Moving back-and-forth between menus works effectively enough. It's when precision is required - such as the flailing lottery that is selecting difficulty - that it all unravels.

Either way, if the intention was to remind us how much easier this stuff is with a controller, it's a roaring success. You are, too often, the barely-in-controller. Suffice it to say, navigation is far easier on Wii. But whilst an irritation on Xbox, it's not a deal breaker. And if you're playing the game properly, you'll be too pissed to care.

The most exciting new feature, exclusive to the Xbox version, is Just Create, a mode that allows you to record and create your own choreography for friends to try locally, or to share online.

Happily, it's as straightforward to use as it sounds. Choose your track, perform your routine (a chunk of a song or the full thing) and you can dance back to it immediately, with the game scoring the attempt as normal. Playback lacks the move indicators of regular songs, but that's probably the last thing you'll be paying attention to.

You can be as serious or silly as you like here, which substantially expands the game's scope for bragging rights or foolish hilarity. Clips can be shared online for others to download, or watch on the official website, justdanceplanet.com.

You have five 'Share Tokens' to begin with, which limits how many videos an individual user is able to post, but your tokens will apparently be topped up on a weekly basis.

A quick word on the Wii version: if you've played previous instalments, this is business as usual. It has all the tracks and the neon, but lacks the Just Create functionality and the general HD polish of Just Dance's Xbox debut. But it's cheaper and just as cheerful.