Review: Get Up And Dance (PS3)

There are many dancing games on the market, with many of them being quite entertaining and successful. If I’m honest with you, I’m not a very good dancer, so I end up being quite proud when I bust out a robotic-esk dance move, making me think in my mind that I am the best dancer on the floor. After playing rival dancing games such as Dance Central and Just Dance I have managed to adapt to the gaming side of the dance floor and have found myself to enjoy dancing titles. Now it’s time for me to grab my move controller and head to the dance floor but this time on the PS3 with the Playstation Move.

I started the game off by just plunging into the main event, I feel I don’t need rehershals but… the option is there if players would like to practice before breaking it down. There are also different options for some of the songs that allow you to take the lead or be the backing dancer. This is a great function in the game and gives you the option to master more than one routine.  After failing terribly on my first try I decided it would be the best to head to the rehershal section of the game and see how the game breaks the dance moves down. Sadly this isn’t applicable in this title and it plays just like the main game. There is no tutorial functionality it literally is just a practice mode, with no explanation.

When it comes to looking at a song to choose there is quite a variety of different songs to take on. I personally was excited to dance to Barenaked Ladies- One Week, a classic by Lionel Richie – Dancing On The Ceiling and Example – Kickstarts. As you can see the songs are spread out across the different generations of music. It’s nice to see the variety, but I personally feel there should of been more tracks bundled with the game. Compared to the other dance titles like Dance Central I feel they had a better track list on the disc. 

After choosing the songs I wished to dance to I jumped in once again thinking this time I won’t embarrassed myself and managed to pull of a flawless combo. This didn’t happen as a lot of the songs are ridiculously hard. Each song has a star rating out of 3, but the lack variation between songs with the same level is limited, making you start of with songs you probably don’t enjoy or want to mess around with. Even the one star songs gave me some difficulty and felt at times the Move accessories weren’t responding enough to my movements.

It seems that the developers targeted for an audience that could already pull of the dance moves on the disc in the real world, compared to Dance Central and Just Dance which are much more enjoyable to play with friends.  You can change the difficulty of each song however… just not in the generic standards. You can only change the difficulty on each song whether you choose do the long version or the short, but this doesn’t change the dance moves either so it’s just depending on how far you can make it through the song before failing miserably like i did. I even got a few friends involved to see if they could do some of the harder songs, sadly they also failed.

With the difficulty being an issue for myself and I would probably say for the majority of you if you don’t tend to play dance games, there are other game modes that may take your fancy. The Classic mode is a typical basic mode, where you can just dance the night away. During this, the official music video plays in the background for every song on the disc, which is something the competitors rarley focus on which makes it a nice addition to this game.  There is also a Keep Fit mode which is pretty self explanatory but this mode allows you to perform a certain routine that  has cardio points associated to it (which is also available in the other modes) so you can acknowledge how much of a work out you are getting from each song. There is also the Shape Up mode which allows you to customise your keep fit experience. I enjoyed these modes a lot more than I would of imagined.

Get Up and Dance’s main feature is of course the mulitplayer functionality. The option for party play is probably the game’s main focus. This said, Get Up and Dance takes things on a serious level compaired to other titles. There’s Last Man Standing which is again pretty straight forward, if you make too many mistakes in the performance and you’re out, with the winner of course being the last one standing. Tug of War has 2 teams battling it out, with the strongest dancers becoming the Get Up And Dance champions. There’s also the option to choose the amount of rounds you partake in.

This is where the game stands out among  its competitors, it may be a hard game to master but the option to have backing dancers allows you to form your own dance group with your friends and take control of different roles in a dance tournament within the game. This mode is basically a career for your group, your overall aim is to win the competition which has 11 progressively harder routines to work through. There are quite a few games that use the Playstation Move functionality and some of them work better than others, as you can imagine Get Up and Dance does a good job picking up your movements but it is very precise with what you have to do to score the higher points. It works, but I still found myself questioning if this game would of worked better on the Kinect.

 

Overall 5/10
Get Up and Dance is a nice varied dance game with a good track list appealing to all different types of music/dance fanatics. Overall the game falls short, with few aspects of the main game made enjoyable for everyone, though it can be fun if you don’t take it too seriously, but there are better options on the market. If you’re looking for a dance game where you can have fun and still progress then I recommended picking up a different title. The multiplayer is good and the backing dancer option is great but the game is really aimed at people who can already dance. There is not much space for practice and learning, which is a shame as this could of been a much better game if they focused more on fun instead of professionalism.