Dance Central 2

by Harmonix

Product Features

• Featuring another killer soundtrack.
• New simultaneous multiplayer.
• All-new dance crews.
• As real as it gets. Dance Central 2 provides detailed feedback for each player and, for the first time, enables voice commands within the practice process!

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0050SYYEK
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches ; 4 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: October 25, 2011
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (214 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #73 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
  • #2 in Video Games > Xbox 360 > Rhythm > Dancing
  • #19 in Video Games > Xbox 360 > All Games

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Get ready for the best-selling dance game on Kinect! With another killer soundtrack, the best routines and all-new multiplayer features, Dance Central 2 is sure to get your party started!

Product Features

• It's Party Time! Team up with your friends to dance collaboratively with all-new simultaneous multiplayer features. Players can drop in or out at any point during a song, so the party never has to stop!
• Pump up the Volume! Dance Central 2 features an unparalleled soundtrack of more than 40 new dance hits and classics. The new, fully integrated in-game Music Store will allow players to expand their song library by importing their Dance Central song list for Dance Central 2, bringing the number of songs available at launch to more than 100 tracks!
• Kick it with the Crews! Dance Central 2 features a variety of new characters and fan favorites paired up as dance crews, each with custom outfits, backup dancers and signature venues.
• As Real as It Gets. Dance Central 2 provides detailed feedback for each player and, for the first time, enables voice commands within the practice process!

Product Description

Get ready for the sequel to the best-selling dance game for Kinect for Xbox 360. Dance Central 2 keeps the wildly addictive Dance Central experience going with a new focus on simultaneous multiplayer. Friends can now team up in Perform It or go head-to-head in a simultaneous dance off within Dance Battle. Additionally, players can seamlessly drop in or out at any point during a song, so the party never has to stop!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

119 of 121 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent doesn't do it justice...., October 25, 2011

By 

Quentin Gerlach "IT Guy" (Trenton, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Dance Central 2 (Video Game)

For those of you who have the Kinect, Dance Central was THE game to get for it. With songs like "Poison" and "Brick House", it was the first game that actually made me want to get off my butt and dance. Though - to be fair, Kinect Sports and Kinect Adventures are great games in their own right, there's nothing quite like the feeling you get when your dance moves sends your friend crying off to mommy. Haha - but in all seriousness, Dance Central made dancing fun. With Break it Down mode, you could learn moves at your own pace, and the actual song never stopped just because you weren't doing so well that one time.

If you didn't think it could get any better, trust me -- it does. The main feature to come to Dance Central 2 is the ability of two people to play at the same time. The function works well enough, though it does get awkward depending on which songs you do. It's actually not a fault of the Kinect, just that one person's body movements sometimes gets in front of yours, and it confuses the game. A nice addition to the game is that when you pick a song, before you play it, the game actually does a little preview of the dance moves involved with the songs - a nice quick way to see how difficult the moves actually are (or aren't).

You also can import your songs from the original Dance Central, unfortunately - you have to pay for the privilege. I really shouldn't have to spend Microsoft Points to redownload the songs - just allow me to store the songs from Dance Central on the HDD or USB stick, and play them from there in Dance Central 2. Also, one of the commentors had mentioned that the dancers don't do their little quirky sayings and moves in the beginning of songs anymore. He's correct, but I'm sure I like it or not. Having them making random sayings or moves gave them personality - almost making me choose one over the others. Maybe it's just me though....

One more thing that can be hit or miss: the game now allows you to go through menus and change options by the regular hand swipes, or with your voice. The voice recognition does work, but I've noticed that it sometimes has a hard time picking up your voice when you're in a song. I really don't like having to turn my TV down when I'm singing "Break Your Heart" by Taio Cruz, ok Harmonix??

Those are really the only three things I can say that are somewhat a negative to this fantastic sequel. They also changed up the songs somewhat - picking some more 90s and today's hits, like "What is Love?" by Haddaway and "Baby Got Back" by Sir Mix-A-Lot. I have to say it - flawless performance on this, Harmonix. Another thing I enjoyed: Dance Battles just got a whole lot more interesting. Instead of having Freestyle like in Perform It mode, they took it out, and put in Freestyle Moves, where the game shows you 4 different moves, and each person can choose whichever they want to perform, but if you and the other player start performing the SAME move, you basically go head-to-head to see who can finish the move correctly FIRST. I can't tell you how much more fun and competitive that made Dance Battles. Also something to note - Dance Central 2 introduced Gold Moves, which are worth 4x the points. And yes - Gold Moves are in Freestyle Moves (can't tell you how much of a competition that creates).

Between the awesome selection of music to the once-again awesome and nice twist of humor in the move names (Sir Mix-It-Up, Funky Charleston just a few of the ones I noticed), Dance Central 2 proves that if you just put the time and effort into it, sequels really can be better than the originals....

52 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Time to get down again, October 27, 2011

By 

Gray Lady "spaz_cadet" (Tacoma, Washington) - See all my reviews

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Dance Central 2 (Video Game)

I'm an old lady, but I love the Dance Central series. And DC2 is a worthy -- better than worthy -- successor to DC.

Like in DC, you'll get to learn new dance moves and choreographies, sweat, and generally have a good time set to good music. But there are a few differences.

1) Graphics. The graphics are a lot better this go-round, from the backgrounds to the way the characters move. Instead of being set in a gritty city setting, they've moved down to a Cali/Miami-styled place, with richer and brighter colors. DC2 looks amazing. The incidental music feels more sophisticated.

2) Instead of dancing as a particular character, you dance with a "crew," whether that means the athletes of Riptide, the club kidz of Hi-Def, or one of the other styled crews. I haven't seen Dare or Oblio, two fan faves from DC, so far in a few hours of play. Boo. However, the crews mean there's a campaign mode. You select the level of difficulty for the dances at the outset (Easy, Medium or Hard), then cruise from one crew to the next dancing their routines with them. This means you get to go through the campaign three times, if you want, and the personalities of the crews come through.

3) Fitness is tweaked. There are playlists, which load pretty rapidly, so you can either do a 20-minute low-impact workout or a 50-minute "long hall." The game estimates calories for you, though I'm curious to know how it does so since a medium-sized old lady like myself burns a vastly lower amount of calories than someone significantly larger and a lot more than a skinny kid. You can also create your own playlists. If there were a "shuffle mode" that would have been perfection.

4) Break It Down mode is WAY better. You can actually get through it faster than in DC, and using voice commands can slow it down, video your movements and check against the dancer, and focus on one or two moves you may need to get through. The only reason I'll never have all the achievements on DC is because one is "get 100 percent on all songs in break it down." If this tech had existed for DC, I might have gotten it.

5) Import all your DC songs. This is great, but 400 MSP? Come on. I'm glad I got the pre-order free points to do it. But the instructions were wrong -- don't redeem code from inside the game for this, go through your XboxLive account. Seriously, there are too many digits for the in-game code redemption, which works for the 240 MSP card you get inside the package.

Speaking of songs, there are some really good ones on DC2. Lots of them are not family-friendly, even with words blipped out. And there are a lot of "meh" songs. I think my biggest disappointment in the DC series is that there is a lot of great dance music out there, but a lot of what DC licenses is ... "meh." What's up with that? Why don't they get a whack at better songs? They get a lot of great songs through "Rock Band," why is a dance game such a challenge?

While I'm on about song choices, I think one of the things that hampers the series is its music choices are all in a limited genre -- hip hop, classic disco/funk and pop. Why not bust out an occasional jazz standard, rockabilly or country song, at least for DLC? Here's where having characters and crews kind of limits the range, one way that the Just Dance series overcomes these limitations. Of course, Just Dance 3 is way more family-friendly than DC. But my point is that if you're going to limit your range, you need to get the best of what's available from that range, and I don't know that Harmonix necessarily does that (I mean, three novelty songs -- the Numa Numa song, "What is Love?" and "Baby Got Back" are supplemented with the Humpty Dance. This is too much novelty. At least they're fun to dance, if not to have stuck in your head -- damn you, Haddaway.)

6) Two people can dance at the same time. Yay! Party time! And there are mini-games in the multiplayer mode.

7) You can shut off Freestyle mode and just do programmed moves for all the DC2 dances (not so much the older stuff you have).

8) The way it reads your moves seems to have improved. Although going "down" in a scroll menu you can still have a rough time of it getting "stuck."

At any rate, there were reasons that DC was the best, most-popular Kinect title on the market forever. And those same reasons -- fun, fitness, challenge, friendly multiplayer -- are still around, and even stronger, in DC2.

62 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dancing Has Returned to the Xbox - Better Than Ever, October 25, 2011

By 

Ryan DeJonghe "Kinect Reviews and Interviews" (New Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Dance Central 2 (Video Game)

When you think about the Kinect, there are a handful of games that come to mind. Without doubt, Dance Central has earned its spot in the Kinect Hall of Fame. There are dance games and then there is Dance Central. Millions of fans have benefited from the fun approach of dance instruction and often club floors are living testimony of Dance Centralfs impact. Now, the DC crew is back and better than ever in Dance Central 2 for Kinect.

FEATURES

There are many positive things to talk about with Dance Central 2. Immediately you will notice the clean interface and ease of menu navigation. The original version of DC was already clean, but Harmonix took their time to make navigation even more of a breeze. This aided tremendously by the addition of voice commands. Within seconds of popping in the game, you can be dancing. For me, all it took was literally saying, gXbox, dance, song, Like a G6, XBox danceh. And off I went.

For those that have already played the first Dance Central and even purchased songs, everything is ready to transfer directly into Dance Central 2. Purchased songs will automatically show up in Dance Central 2s playlist. To carry over all the songs from the original Dance Central, you will need the code that came with the first game and 400 MS Points (5 USD). The transition is smooth, but you will need a harddrive or USB drive, as well as a connection to the internet. Once the songs carry over, everything is integrated into the game. Your play list becomes HUGE. All of Dance Central 2s new features are supported except the option to skip the freestyle part of the song.

The new game play modes are subtle, but add a lot of play value to Dance Central 2. My personal favorite new additions include the ability to make my own playlists and the Dance Crew challenges. There are already a decent amount of pre-made playlists, but you are able to pick your own songs for some killer back-to-back dancing sessions. As for the Dance Crew challenges, this is as close as you are going to get in a story mode for the game. Essentially, you meet a Dance Crew, dance the selected songs, and unlock the next crew. This makes it more of an immersive game versus dancing for the heck of it.

One huge bonus of Dance Central 2 is the ability to have two players, either playing cooperatively or battling it out. The second player can hop in and out of the game with ease and at any time. Like the song? Jump in and play. That easy.

One of the main niceties of playlists is for working out. Our Kinect to Fitness and Health group has already seen great success in people losing up to and over 100 pounds from playing the original Dance Central. On top of the improvements already mentioned, the workout mode now has its own screen in Dance Central 2. Calories are tracked from every activity, including Break It Down mode. When doing the playlists, the songs flow from one to another without interruption. What I absolutely LOVE is how quickly you now move into the song. No more waiting for your dancer to bounce around and talk buckets of smack. They might do a quick move and a few words, but nothing like the original Dance Central. And finally, when the dancing is done, the calories are added all up. The calorie tracker may not be totally correct (no weight or gender asked), but you definitely have an idea of how close you are to burning off that Halloween candy.

Break It Down mode has returned and has been made more inviting for us impatient folks. The same mode from the original has returned, but with added voice control. There is a sweet satisfaction in yelling, gskiph after being told to perform ehitch a ridef for the millionth time. Better yet, for the returning veterans, you will be able to pick out certain steps to learn, versus learning the routine. And for the curious mind that wants to know exactly what they are doing, you can shout, grecord videoh and a video of you dancing a particular move will show up behind the dance leader for comparison.

The final added feature that really brightened my day was the cleaned up store-front. The first Dance Central had the ability to buy extra songs, but was made cumbersome by having to pull up an extra menu and scroll through a few songs at a time. The new store is built into the game and is just as easy to navigate as the playerfs song list is. With a quick flick of the wrist, you can be jamming to James Brown in no time.

GRAPHICS AND SONGS

Despite all the nifty new features, the dividing point between Dance Central 2 and Just Dance 3 seems to be the songs and the graphics. Ifll have a more detailed comparison of these two games up later. As for Dance Central 2, the graphics are very similar, but have definitely had an overall. Character models are similar, but backgrounds and special effects have been smoothed out and upgraded. The game is a lot more pleasing to the eye. Between the scenic locales and neon hand paths, everything feels more alive than the original.

Everything in a dance game comes down to one thing: songs. The fact is, if you enjoy the music, you will enjoy dancing to it. Dance Central 2 has everything from Gaga to Willow in it. There isnft a song on the list that you probably wonft hear at the club. The song variety is a little more eclectic than the first Dance Central, but you still wonft find anything your granny might be anxious to jump into. The songs are all fun, even the Bieber one, but thankfully there are those playlists to pick your favoritescjust in case youfve had your fill of ethe Biebh.

THE FIVE Ffs

When reviewing games, I like to look for the five ffs: family, fitness, fun, functionality, and firsts. Dance Central 2 is rated for the teen crowd and above. Mostly for lyrics, but there are a few mildly suggestive dances. I mean, do you really think you can dance Baby Got Back or The Humpty Dance without smacking some booty? For the fitness folks, there isnft a better game I can think of that will get your cardio flowing. Playlists and trimmed song intros will make sure you are getting a full heart-pounding workout. Without doubt Dance Central 2 is one of the most fun games around. Now with two player tracking and voice commands, the same trusted functionality of the original has been upped. There isnft a lot ground-breaking features that Dance Central 2 brings to the table, but you can expect a lot of additional features compared to the original. Calorie tracking, playlists, uploading to Facebook, and more have all been done by other games, but now you can have the complete package.

PROS

- Streamlined play
- Two players
- Playlist creation
- Calorie tracker
- Many more!!

CONS
- None!

FINAL THOUGHTS

If you have ever been interested in a dancing game, then this is the one to get. With the streamlined play, ability to bring in your previously owned songs, and added player tracking, youfll be partying for quite a while. The song selection has spread out, but still maintains its roots. Essentially, the bottom line is, if you own a Kinect then you will need to eventually own Dance Central 2.