Country Dance All Stars Kinect Review

Country Dance™ All Stars

Platform: Kinect for Xbox 360
Price: $39.99
Launch Date: March 27, 2012
Rating: E10+
Publisher: GameMill Entertainment
Developer: High Voltage
Game Facebook Page
Game Twitter Feed: @Country_Dance

You’ll go country after playing the first song in Country Dance All Stars for Kinect. The game is geared purely to country fans. Not often does a game come along that embraces your geeky, country side. In fact, this is the first Xbox 360 Kinect country dance game. Like other Kinect dance games, the object is to mimic the dancers movements on screen. Your final score is based off the percentage of how you performed all the dance moves throughout the song. The percentage is broken down to miss, ok, good and great ratings.

Country Dance All Stars is packed with a great playlist and offers a nice mix of 30+ classics and new songs. In the beginning the menus were frustrating, but once you learn what works and what doesn’t you’ll cruise right along. You use your right hand for commands like continue or enter and your left hand to go back. The game offers 3 game types: normal, perfection, and freeze. Perfection only scores moves that are rated “Great!”. In freeze they stop the music and you have to hold a pose. Along with single player there is also two player multiplayer, which can be played as co-op or competitive play, but are both local only. I jumped right into normal single player only to find my dancing skills were pretty rusty. I was disappointed to find the rehearsal mode didn’t offer much help. Rather then allow you to control the speed of a song; you had to repeat the same section of the song over and over at full speed.

I pushed my perfectionist nature aside and called my boyfriend in for some co-op game play.  The choreography was matched nicely with the songs. Some songs even follow a specific line dance routine. These were a great addition and I hope to see more line dancing songs as DLC. All specific line dance songs are marked with a pair of boots next to the song name. Although each song has it’s own unique routine, the routines are made up of several repeated moves. About half way through a song you’ll start catching on to the routine.  It’s also a nice addition to have the lyrics played at the bottom of the screen. I can see this being a great addition if you’re having a few friends over. With proper lighting the Kinect only had minor issues reading our movements. The same issues can be found in many Kinect games.

The gameplay graphics are below average. You can’t customize or pick a dance character, but rather you’re given a mix of the same female and male characters that lack any personality. The mediocre graphics I can over look, but there’s this weird detail in the character shirts that I’ve never seen in a game before.  The patterns on all the characters shirts are masked around a static pattern. So as the character dances their shirts slide around moving across the pattern. It’s hard to explain, but it looks like they’re having wardrobe malfunctions left and right.

Country Dance All Stars for Kinect is lacking a few details that separate it from other Kinect dance games, but over-all we had a blast playing it. If you’re a gamer that’s also a country fan this is a fun game to add to your library.

We’d like to thank @ReverbGames for giving us the chance to review the game we had a blast.

Songs that come with the game:

	Song Playlist	9
	Graphics	5.5
	Kinect Readability	7
	Choreography	8
	Overall	7.5