Dance Central for Kinect is an entire new way to track your dance moves in a video game. Obviously there are many game reviews on Dance Central so I'm going to get right into the details. I want to add as much new information as possible on this game, how much fun it is, and if it will be something you will play for weeks and weeks.

How accurate is it at detecting dance moves?

For me this is always the biggest question. In Dance Central it can actually become hard to tell if perhaps Kinect is missing a move or you are doing it wrong. The game does a great job of giving feedback by making the part of your body red that is out of sync. Dance Central in fact can be very very accurate. One  of the moves I had practiced over and over and over again I was sure I was getting right. Then as I stopped trying to look for the red corrections and just my hands and feet, I realized that my head move was out of sync. Once I fixed my head move I was nailing that dance step every time.

Dance Central can in fact be very very challenging. I expect more so for people like myself who never really worked to learn specific dance moves. I can see someone do something and kind of fake my way through it, but Dance Central makes you work at it. There are no real short cuts to learning the moves and getting them down. One of the best parts of Dance Central is that once you have it down and you are confident in your move the game is typically spot on. What is amazing is that sometimes even the angle of your arm can make the difference.

Breaking It Down and Slow It Down

When thinking of tips to offer people the best advice I can have is to break it down, and then even slow it down. In the slow it down mode you have a chance to practice a move over and over again at a much slower tempo. This allows you to work through all the specifics of the move.

When I'm learning a very hard move with lots of different arm and feet movement I will sometimes just focus on the arms and then on the feet. If it is a very very hard move then you can even try to just get say your right arm doing the move, Then add the left arm. In slowdown motion this is easy enough to do. One issue I've found in the game is that it can be quick to give up when you are just breaking it down and not in slow motion. The game will quickly just jump to the next dance step.

 Quality of the Songs

The game itself has quite a few songs and they offer a reasonable variety of different styles. I personally don't care for some of the music but it definitely works for dancing and only a few songs I found very annoying. Fortunately we can expect many downloadable songs in the future so that will add a lot of value to this game and hopefully keep adding new dance steps to learn.

Dance Central and longterm game value

Kinect offers quite a few fun games at launch but unfortunately many of them, except for perhaps the workout games, are not going to be the kind of games you play week after week. Dance Central is an exception. It is very wel done and is not the kind of game you can get through in 10 hours. While it maybe called a 'casual' game title even hardcore gamers would have to really work to finish this title on the hard difficulty setting. Another bonus is the game is a bit of a workout. It's no P90X, but it definitely gets the heart pumping a bit. If you keep it up for 45 minutes to an hour you will certainly feel it. Finally the best part is that you really are learning some skills in this Dance Central game. Unlike many of the previous dance games where you really just had to get your feet to the right place at the right time, dance central makes you perform real move. Some of them are cheesy. But there is a great variety and over time you get better at learning dance moves in general. I expect more dance games will come out to challenge gamers skills on the dance floor.

Great first attempt at a breakthrough in dance games. I think this is an A title and will offer challenges to the best of gamers.