Dance Central was touted as the must-have title for the Kinect since before it was even released, and it’s easy to see why. With the Rock Band series under their belt, Harmonix has a really impressive track record when it comes to creating excellent music-based games. Do they live up to that with Dance Central, or will the game have you never wanting to hear a Lady Gaga track again?

The core game play of Dance Central has you dancing along with in-game flashcards that pop up on the right side of the screen. While this happens, a person on the screen will dance along to the music as an ensemble of excited people cheer them (and you) on. You really won’t be able to spend a ton of time looking at the dancer, though, as the only way to brace yourself for impending moves is to watch the flashcards closely. At first, the dancer and the flashcards compete for your attention as you try to get the moves down just right. In time, you will find yourself capable of performing songs without the need for flashcards, and the option to turn them off is available. When the initial shame subsided, I was proud of my ability to dance along to Lady Gaga’s Poker Face entirely from memory.

The game’s ability to detect your every movement is thoroughly impressive, if not frustrating. There were quite a few moments where I was fairly certain I was doing a move just right, only to find that I was doing it incorrectly because of placing my arm or leg just barely astray from where they should have been. The precision doesn’t hinder the fun in the least, but it will definitely have you retrying songs – particularly when playing on either medium or hard mode – in the same way Rock Band does.

Trendy clothes are not crucial in order to play, but they definitely help.

Dancing is not something that comes easy to most of us, but Harmonix has found a way to make it an absolute blast. Some songs are harder than others, and some moves are hard to get down just right, but the rewarding feeling when you do it correctly makes it more than worthwhile. I’m a pretty bad dancer, and I don’t have a very strong sense of rhythm, and I still found myself grooving to the music with ease after a bit of time with the game.

Dance Central allows you to perform any song you want from the second you put the disc in, but there are still difficulty modes and items to be unlocked. If you beat a song on easy with three stars, then you can progress to the medium version of that song. If you get three stars on medium, then you can play the song on hard. The songs themselves are broken into tiers, with each tier containing five tracks of varying difficulties. They’re supposed to be sorted by their level of difficulty, but difficulty is an extremely subjective concept in this game. I found myself having much less trouble with songs at the bottom of the list than I did with some songs near the top.

The ability to perform every song right away makes local multiplayer an even better experience, but it also feels as though a career mode was sacrificed to make way for that ability. While there is a ranking system of sorts that you will constantly be cashing into as you perform songs, there is no story mode or option to tether songs together to perform them all at once. Perhaps I’m spoiled from being so used to having these things in Rock Band titles, but the lack of those options makes Dance Central feel a little bit bare bones in terms of what it has to offer. They could have created a career mode where you played as an up-and-coming dancer looking to make it big, but unfortunately we are left without the option to play the protagonist in a riveting dance story.