Dance Evolution First Look

Dancing games that ask you to mimic the moves of the onscreen guide or follow the arrows are anything but new, practically spilling out of arcades both in Japan and the rest of the world. Up to this point, though, if you wanted to get a workout by busting a move in your own lounge room, you were forced to pony up for hardware to track your performance. Dance mats have long been the most accepted devices to measure skills, but they represent expensive investment and offer little in the way of interoperability with other games.

Enter Dance Evolution, a game designed from the ground up to work with Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing camera system. It frees you from the cables and hassle when all you want to do is get down. This is a rhythm game, and while the interface for movements has altered slightly, it’s still all about earning points by following the bouncing ball along with the beat.

Our time with the demo gave us the choice of a handful of songs, mostly J-pop, and included a handy beats-per-minute (BPM) indicator for each track to help determine how sweaty we wanted to get. Menu navigation was done by sweeping our hand either to the left or to the right in front of us, though we noticed that regardless of how gently we waved, the game would either lurch violently forward through the track listing or crawl to the next option. Since we were at TGS, we opted for the appropriate-sounding "A Geisha's Dream" (which you can listen to in the trailer below) and picked the easiest difficulty setting after watching more adventurous players ramp it straight to normal on their first try with mixed success.

Once we had picked our track and intensity, we raised our hand in the air like we just didn’t care to let it know we were ready to do our thing. A mirror image of the player appears to the left and right of the animated dance instructors in real time. Gameplay is split into three distinct types: silhouettes, which you need to contort or extend your limbs to match; punch circles, that represent claps and pushes; and swipes, where you need to trail your arms in the direction shown at a specific speed. Our dance partner opted for the normal difficulty, and we glanced over to see her performing more advanced moves, like double swipes, in alternating directions and a significantly higher number of pose moves. As is typical of rhythm games, there is a counter to track the number of successful moves performed in a row, and though not explained to us, we did notice a slowly filling blue doughnut in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen that became more complete as we danced. Interestingly it didn’t reset if we dropped our multiplier, and it didn't appear to change what was happening onscreen. Like Activision's DJ Hero, regardless of how badly you may struggle to keep up with the action onscreen, you won’t ever flunk out. At least not that we saw.

Since your next move doesn’t appear onscreen in advance and there’s a brief delay between viewing, processing, and then commanding your limbs to respond, the game seemed quite accommodating as we bumbled our way through the opening of the song. Initially aiming to simply perform the body shapes as they scrolled onto the screen to earn points rather than dance, we quickly abandoned the idea and simply followed our virtual choreographer and found it to be a much more natural experience. Since moves are often repeated, it became more like a free-form memory game, aping the manoeuvres rather than waiting on the scoring objective. Changes in pace like slow arm raises after fast hand motions can throw you quickly, but we’d hazard that like with any rhythm game, while the initial learning curve can be a little steep, subsequent plays will become smoother as you learn the mechanics and timing required.

Unfortunately for us we were only allowed a single song, but we left the booth eager to give it another shot and dance the night away. With Rock Band developer Harmonix also supporting Microsoft’s Kinect camera at launch, you may want to consider investing in a glowstick, a whistle, and some light-up flooring in advance. Dance Evolution will be boogying on the Xbox 360 this November.