With music track selection better than the disco down at your local pub, and greater accessibility than the most recent incarnation of Dance, Dance Revolution, the entrance of Ubisoft's Just Dance sees one of the most simplistic rhythm music games arrive on the home console market. Over the last few years the market has been flooded by games where you can sing to music karaoke style or fill in for a professional band, most of which are accessible to the casual player of video games, but despite DDR retaining a cult of popularity it has never been extremely accessible to the casual player and so the market has been lacking in a reasonable dance based music game...until now.

Oh, I was under the impression that everyone had heard...

Ubisoft have designed a dance game that moves far away from the convolution of Konami's series, keeps away from the intricacies of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and settles itself in the carefree nature of popular karaoke console games such as Singstar and Lips. This simplicity makes the game a breath of fresh air to play, and builds on the Wii's continued opportunity to give game developers a new way to think about game play with popular genres.

There are several different play modes, including Practice and Warm Up, with single player in Quick Play mode, then different challenges that may be set up in multiplayer. All take advantage of the roughly 30-track line up, that ranges from Dare to Mashed Potato Time. Each track has a rating in Difficulty and in Effort, which is based off of the complexity of the dance moves involved and the intensity of the track. On the screen when you play you have footage of real professional dancers, which have been colourized in a pop art way, performing the dance moves and instructions of the basic moves coming up scrolling along on the bottom of the screen. The game scores you according to how closely you perform the moves to the dancer on screen and with what level of effort you put into it, all whilst you hold on tightly to the Wiimote. But this game is not about scoring.

I could do with a Holiday about now...

Just Dance has been getting a great deal of mixed reviews, mostly negative from other professional reviewers. Their complaints tend to be in regards to the sensitivity of the controls, or supposed lack of it, and the absence of any career mode. Just Dance does pick up movements from the Wiimote quite successfully, but with the Wii Motion Plus that part would be even better, had it been supported. The issue really comes down to a player's ability to comprehend and translate the moves seen on screen to how they move their own body. If you can't get the moves within the generous approximation that the game allows, or time them correctly, then you don't get scored favourably or at all. This is the same as any other rhythm music game, and as always, practice makes perfect.