Dance Paradise Xbox 360

Dance Paradise showcases very easy moves that are not really dancing at all. It contains 40 videos on its playlist, and even though these songs are danceable, you won’t feel like dancing with any of the moves that appear on the screen. The animation for the first few songs will only tell you to ‘move the shoulders a bit’, ‘clap’ and ‘do the chicken’, in a wedding party on a beach. The difficult levels in the Career mode will only require you to move like hammering a piano or like playing an invisible air guitar. Yeah, and your final song will be Alright by Supergrass.

Okay, if we are talking about shifting of tracks, it’s a thumbs up for Dance Paradise, but because it is too much of leaning and pausing to shift songs, you would not feel like it is dancing. You will feel like you are just calibrating the track system. Though calibrating this game is perfect – well, maybe for the upper part of your body only. Yes, it does not calibrate your lower body and you can just stand there and receive a perfect rating.

Hmm, maybe we can find something cool in Dance Paradise? Oh well, sort of. Its multiplayer function is actually fun. Since the moves are just simple moving around, your friends who don’t play much can actually enjoy just having fun around it. It has three multiplayer modes. These are the Versus, Synchro and Attack mode which can give power-ups to give your opponent a hard time keeping up with you. And there’s also this video DJ section and you can select music videos to fit on the tracks. And if you think the videos are no fun at all, check out the vids by Lady Gaga and Gwen Stefani.

The screens and menus are acceptable, however, are of less quality and average for the Kinect platform. The menus are too sensitive that even a light press will re-load a song from the menu.

Overall, if we are basing it on the fun, Dance Paradise is quite good, especially at parties where you get drunk. But when you get back to reality, you realize it doe not match up to any music game the industry has today – either the Dance Central by Harmonix or the DanceMasters by Konami.

I feel Dance Paradise is definitely not just inferior to any of these, but it is too poor in itself to even match up to the platform it is, which is the Kinect. It should have been more advanced and more complex to play. I loved the multiplayer mode, and I would have wished to feel the same amount of fun in the single player. But this mode still lacks that depth needed to rate it anywhere near the halfway point of the dance genre.