If you have a Kinect, chances are that it isn’t the most used accessory of your XBox 360. Though tons have been sold, there hasn’t been great support of good games for it. In fact, many have been downright disappointing like Star Wars Kinect. The shining light for Kinect has been the Dance Central series.

With the first two titles, Dance Central has proven to be one of the best applications of the Kinect technology in terms of accurate recording of the player’s movements and giving a fun experience that actually utilizes the Kinect technology in a fun way. Now, for the third year in a row, the team at Harmonix brings back its dance craze inspired game with incredible results in the form of Dance Central 3.

The Long

If you’ve never played a Dance Central title before, the premise of the game is very simple. Players stand in front of the Kinect controller and mirror the movements they see of the characters on screen. The angle of their arms, legs and body are all monitored by the Kinect as a player follows the motions on screen. The accuracy of the player’s movements determines how well they score on each dance move. Higher scores mean more stars, which have been trend in Harmonix’s music games for some time now.

A year ago, Activision proved you could have too much of a good thing with their Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock release which has been the last major band based rhythm game to come out with any sort of real backing to the mass market. For years, guitar and band games dominated sales charts between Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

Those who presumably had taken this the worst had to be Harmonix who had pioneered the plastic instrument market with the original Guitar Hero only to see their own new franchise Rock Band take a beating from the oversaturated market caused by Activision. But from the ashes of so many plastic guitars and drum kits, a new genre came back to life with the dance game with both Dance Central and Just Dance.

Dance Central would captivate the world by measuring the full use of the dancer’s body to see how accurately they could replicate the motions on screen which quickly made it the defining piece of hardware for the newly launched XBox 360 Kinect peripheral. Now, Dance Central 2 returns to show you really can’t have too much of a good thing… as long as you do it right.

Gameplay:

Dance Central 2, like its predecessor, revolves around players standing in front of their TV and mirroring the dance moves in front of them. At heart, it is an incredibly simple concept but anyone who has tried dancing at any point in their life can vouch that just because you can see it done in front of you, it doesn’t mean you can do it too without a little practice.

Dance Central 2 works with all levels of dance skill thankfully so people who are experienced dancers can be challenged while rookie rump shakers can still enjoy themselves even though their arms and legs flailing in the air may make them look like they are having a seizure to passersby. Thankfully, individual dances still have the freestyle sections where the Kinect takes pictures of players to remind them just how silly they look in motion.