It's 9am, I've got the house to myself for a couple of hours. I hastily close all the curtains and slip the Just Dance 4 disk into my console. I pray that no one walks in on me dancing to Umbrella by Rihanna 3 times in a row on my own just to unlock some dumb video game points. As the song goes on, I start to get into the rhythm of the song and put a bit more effort into my moves. Maybe I am having fun, I think to myself. I start to build up a slight sweat and really get into it, running my hand up my leg and shaking my hip, the best Rihanna impression I can muster. As the song comes to a close, I manage a 5 star rating, sick! Following the song the game decides to share with me lots of images of me dancing and I realise how stupid I look. I hang my head in shame, shut down the console and remind myself to never embarrass myself like that again.
This game has a target audience and I'm sure you know if you are part of that target audience or not, and I am not. However, for the sake of reviews, I wanted to give all the Just Dance games on the 360 a try. JD4 was the second of the mainline games on the console, after 3, and it is actually really good. Getting the basics out of the way, unlike a lot of kinect games, the game actually works. The motion sensor can track your movements really well and I never really felt hard done by missing moves, it was normally my fault. The songs can be attacked on your own or with a group of up to 4 players and you follow a on screen chracter to perform moves to match the songs. Unlike some other version which use the controllers, the 360 has the kinect to track your whole body and it uses this tracking images to give you scores from perfect to miss. The song list is very subjective, so I won't go too much into that, but it's some basic pop stuff ranging from recent to classics. The songs work well from this type of game and it's just fairly solid all round, with all the songs being fun to dance to and enough content to keep you entertained for a long time. There are some negatives though. The game has a work out mode which measures how many calories you have burned. As far as I can tell though, this is just more dancing, it doesn't change up the game in any drastic way and isn't really competition to any of the kinect fitness games on the console. The other, and more frustrating thing, is the menu navigation. It's a little difficult to explain, but instead of the standard hold your hand over an item to select it method of most kinect games, JD4 goes for a push the button to select it input method. If you have every played a kinect game, you will know how bad at depth perception the kinect is and how frustrating this will become. Still, if you can get past this, you will enjoy this one. It's one of the better kinect games on the console.
This game has a target audience and I'm sure you know if you are part of that target audience or not, and I am not. However, for the sake of reviews, I wanted to give all the Just Dance games on the 360 a try. JD4 was the second of the mainline games on the console, after 3, and it is actually really good. Getting the basics out of the way, unlike a lot of kinect games, the game actually works. The motion sensor can track your movements really well and I never really felt hard done by missing moves, it was normally my fault. The songs can be attacked on your own or with a group of up to 4 players and you follow a on screen chracter to perform moves to match the songs. Unlike some other version which use the controllers, the 360 has the kinect to track your whole body and it uses this tracking images to give you scores from perfect to miss. The song list is very subjective, so I won't go too much into that, but it's some basic pop stuff ranging from recent to classics. The songs work well from this type of game and it's just fairly solid all round, with all the songs being fun to dance to and enough content to keep you entertained for a long time. There are some negatives though. The game has a work out mode which measures how many calories you have burned. As far as I can tell though, this is just more dancing, it doesn't change up the game in any drastic way and isn't really competition to any of the kinect fitness games on the console. The other, and more frustrating thing, is the menu navigation. It's a little difficult to explain, but instead of the standard hold your hand over an item to select it method of most kinect games, JD4 goes for a push the button to select it input method. If you have every played a kinect game, you will know how bad at depth perception the kinect is and how frustrating this will become. Still, if you can get past this, you will enjoy this one. It's one of the better kinect games on the console.