Game Review: Dance Central 2

The short review: I freaking love this game.

The long(er) review: This game basically fixes all the issues people had with Dance Central 1. For those who have never played either one, they are the dancing equivalent of Rock Band: they teach you dance moves and routines of varying difficulty levels, and you dance them and get scored on it. (It's even made by the same people that make Rock Band.) 

Main things I liked about the first one:

- fun way to exercise

- excellent replay value

- lots of variety in difficulty (between songs as well as going from Easy to Medium to Hard)

- decent selection of songs

Main improvements with DC2:

- 2 player option

- much more flexible "Break it down" mode - the mode that teaches you the dance routine

- voice enabled commands (i.e. I can shout "XBox: pause" mid song and it will pause)

- all the songs from DC1 ported over so I can still play my favorites

- it can video you doing a move when you are learning it, and then replays the video so you can see what you are doing wrong

- it's usually quite accurate at recognizing me and signing me in automatically!

Really, the only thing I don't like about DC2 is that some of their song choices are really strange. For the most part they picked good ones, but there are a few that made me raise my eyebrows a bit (and I think are the main reason for the Teen rating). Still, with all the downloadable content that's available, plus all the songs ported from DC1, plus the song list it came with, I have plenty to choose from, so it's not really an issue. 

For those of you who think you can't dance, this game can change that (if you let it). Unless you have zero sense of rhythm AND zero coordination, pretty much anybody can learn the routines in this game with a little time and practice. And once you get through the relatively small learning curve, it's definitely one of the funnest and best Kinect enabled games out there.

If you have an XBox 360 and Kinect, I strongly recommend you buy this game.