It all comes down, really, to whether you actually like to dance. If you don’t, Just Dance 2 will hardly change your mind. Oddly enough though, liking games and liking to dance aren’t mutually exclusive, and if – herein lies the rub – you hang out with people who like to dance and aren’t particularly bothered about games, Just Dance 2 will change their minds. Excellently choreographed, amusingly varied and much better-presented than the original, Just Dance 2 is refreshingly uncomplicated fun. If you’d rather shoot aliens, that’s fine, but games are an ever-more inclusive medium, and there’s no need to be a misery and ruin it for everyone else.
You get the impression that Ubisoft is wary about what the critics might think of Just Dance 2. It shouldn’t be. Despite our surly demeanours and propensity to moan, games reviewers like to have fun as much as everyone else. True, we do it secretly and with the aid of unbridled alcoholic lubrication, but that’s only as a precaution in case anyone from the outside ever catches us indulging in the secret pleasures of illicit warbling and frantic, musical gesticulation.
It goes without saying then: if you were one of the miserable killjoys that thought the original Just Dance was worthless because it didn’t have unlockables and traditional game progression, you might as well stop reading now. Go shoot things in the face and snort up your ground-down Halo: Reach disc instead. Just Dance 2 is still a game with absolutely no depth or subtlety. Thing is though, it’s also a tremendously enjoyable game with absolutely no depth or subtlety. It doesn’t need layered gameplay, excellent graphics and achievements. It’s a dance game. It needs hilarious routines and a good soundtrack, and it’s got both of those in spades.
What does Just Dance 2 involve then? The clue is in the title: just dance. You hold the Wii Remote in your hand and imitate the perfectly-captured dancers on-screen to one of over 40 songs. All the songs are, quite sensibly, open from the start – frankly, if you need incentivised unlockables to motivate you to dance, this isn’t the game for you.
Just Dance 2′s appeal lies in the breadth of its songs and the routines that accompany them, running the full gamut from out-and-out silly to cool-looking, racing up and down the difficulty ladder as they go. If you scoff at the idea of a challenging dance routine, I defy you to make it through Body Movin’ without breaking a serious sweat. There are songs for everyone here, from 10-year-old girls (Girlfriend) to much older girls who are still 10 on the inside (Toxic, When I Grow Up) to people with taste (Take Me Out, Move Your Feet, A-Punk) to people born before 1970 (I Feel Good, Viva Las Vegas).
Just Dance 2 is also far from the shovelware the series has been unfairly labelled as – you need only look at the amount of effort and individuality put into every single dance routine to be proven wrong. Walk Like An Egyptian and Sympathy for the Devil couldn’t be more different. Many dance games recycle the same old moves for every song, but not this. The dancers on-screen are even decked out in appropriate gear: swaying wigs, robot suits, flares, canes and even bobble hats.
Unsurprisingly, Just Dance 2 is most fun with two or more people. You can dance four at a time, assuming you have room in your lounge, and it even has duet dances designed for especially for two players. During these routines, there are two dancers on the screen and the final chorus is usually punctuated by some awesome dance-off moments. Think of it as co-op dancing, if you need to put Just Dance 2 into conventional gaming vocabulary. There’s even Just Sweat mode for lone dancers, which sets you up with six songs a day to perform and gives you a calorie counter to pretend to ignore.
Just Dance 2 clearly has a bigger budget than its predecessor (largely fuelled by the millions of people who bought it first time around, we would assume). The presentation has the same cheerful, neon feel, but the scoring meters look much less amateurish. The dancers themselves are still 2D videos of real people, with brightly-coloured clothing and rad accessories over white bodies and faces, like iPod people at a disco party – but that’s actually a wise design choice.
There are no shonky, slightly wrong-looking 3D models dancing in front of you on the screen. Just Dance 2 doesn’t make you feel self-conscious. You don’t look as cool as the choreographed dancers, obviously – you look like someone swinging a Wii Remote and possibly your hips around in a living room – but the game excels in making you FEEL like you look cool, and that’s the main thing.
How Just Dance 2 actually measures your movements is enduringly mysterious, but attempts to cheat by waving an arm around always result in terrible scores, and you get better at dances the more you do them. It’s got more depth than any other dance game I’ve played in that respect. Just Dance 2 will meet its first real competition when Dance Central comes out in a few months, but I’m going to hedge my bets and say that Just Dance 2 has the edge because you don’t have to buy a £130 camera in order to play it. Also, however good motion-captured 3D models are, they’re just not the same as video of real, toe-tapping persons showing you how to do it properly.
The measure of any social video game is the memorable moments they create – the evenings (or wee small drunken hours) spent floundering in the face of doing the robot to Satisfaction, watching a friend topple head-over-arse attempting Ra-Ra-Rasputin’s cossack dancing, the mildly awkward moment in the middle of The Shoop Shoop Song where you accidentally meet your duet partner’s eyes. Measured in those terms, Just Dance 2 is definitely a hit.
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