Review: SingStar Dance

Posted by Chris K on November 30th, 2010 | 3 Comments | Tags: Singstar Dance

I surprised my friends over the Thanksgiving break with this game. Usually after we all get a little socially lubricated in one way or another SingStar always gets loaded up. I told them that I got a PlayStation Move and they were all eager to try out Sports Champions, most of them have never used the Move before. So after we finished that someone said it was SingStar time, and I popped Dance. While we all had a good time, it was mostly just laughing at how bad our dancing was on the replay videos.

What made our dancing so bad, well mostly it was due to the fact that you pretty much have to memorize the choreography. There is no indication of what dance move will be coming next. There is just this darkened silhouette of a dancer and you are expected to follow their moves to a t. This same silhouette is blocking the majority of the screen, so you can’t even see if you are doing the move right. A majority of the time we were just flailing our arms and bumping into each other. I will upload a video from the game later so you can see. With the dancing on easy we usually were only scoring about 2-3 thousand points a song. I can’t even imagine this game on hard.

The game does have one thing going for it though, the track list is excellent. If you listen to the podcast this week, I go over the tracks and the majority of them are new to the series here in North America. You will be getting Lady Gaga, Backstreet Boys, N’Sync… these are songs everyone knows. They also added a few choice hip-hop songs like Day’N Nite by Kid Cudi. Thankfully that song is mostly singing as the rap scoring system that SingStar uses is still broken.

This was also the first SingStar game that I have played since getting my PlayStation Eye. I was really impressed with all the features that I was missing out on before. Like how you take a picture after every song to add in the highscore table. We had fun striking poses or just goofing around with this. You can also switch between the live feed and the music video on the fly. If one of the people flailing doesn’t want to see themselves on TV this is a nice option.

Having the game come out so late after the original SingStar is also a problem. Because if you buy this only 30 of the tracks that you have will be dance ready. I know if your parties are anything like mine, people don’t want to sing the same songs over and over again. They are releasing dance tracks on the SingStore now, but I wish that all my tracks worked right out of the box.

If you are looking to grab some new tracks for SingStar I can totally recommend picking this up. Heck you don’t even need a Move to sing the songs. Plus more music is never a bad thing, especailly when it is stuff everyone knows. Sadly the dancing just devolves into a flailing match while you furiously try to keep up with the dance moves. Watching the replays will be funny, and trust me they are, but I think that it might get old quick.

For more info on our review policy click here. This review is for the PlayStation 3 version of the game.

Click Here to purchase SingStar Dance from Amazon.com

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