XboxFitness.org

The Best Exercise Games for the Xbox Kinect

Review of Grease Dance for Xbox Kinect

Posted by steve on November - 7 - 2011 with 0 Comment

Grease Dance

Not the One that You Want

Grease Dance is 505 Games’ attempt to cash in on the success of dance games. While they scored a coup in being able to license the songs of the musical Grease, their implementation of motion tracking is sloppy. Recommended for die-hard fans of Grease, but everyone else can take a pass on this one.

Rating by steve: 3.0 stars
***

Grease Dance is the latest in a line of “me too” dance video games that game publishers are flooding the market with in hopes of cashing in on the recent dance game craze. The publisher in this case is 505 Games, the same company who brought you such memorable movie tie-in games as Top Gun: The Game. (Yes, I’m being sarcastic :P)

Their latest game is Grease Dance. As has been established on the review of Grease Dance for PS3, the Playstation version is borderline dreadful with horrific implementation of the motion controls. So the question is, what’s the verdict for the Kinect version?

Virtually everything in the Kinect version is the same as the Playstation version. You can play along with the same characters from the movie, including Danny and Sandy. But the characters are all rendered as 50’s style cartoon characters. I definitely would have liked to see something a bit more realistic, perhaps the real actors from the current Broadway show or something. You have two options: to “Dance” or to “Sing” to your favorite songs from the movie and musical.

Here’s me in my ninja costume dancing to “Greased Lightning”.

Pretty good, huh? I thought so too. I was very happy with my 1,471,000 points.

But then I tried playing the game again, but instead of doing the moves, I just ran in place for the whole song. Seriously, I just stood in front of the camera and jogged. The result? I got 863,000 points, including 50% “Perfect” and a “best streak” of 31 moves in a row. Ironically, while the PS3 version was overly restrictive in its scoring, the Xbox version was overly generous.

This kind of sums up Grease Dance. As with many movie tie-in games, the publisher probably paid so much for the rights to license the content that they had to skimp on other trivial things, such as getting the thing to work in the first place.

Having said that, there are positives about the game. The choreography seems mostly true to what you see in the movies and the Broadway show. Of course you have all the hit songs from “You’re the One That I Want” to “Summer Nights”.
And unlike the PS3 version, the camera stays pretty much fixed on you and doesn’t jump all over the place. But overall the experience pales in comparison to either of the leading dance games, Dance Central 2 or Just Dance 3.

Bottom line, if you’re a huge fan of the music of Grease, you may be willing to overlook the inadequacies of the game just to be able to sing and dance to the great music (with licensing working the way it does, chances are these songs will not be available as DLC for Dance Central 2 nor Just Dance 3 anytime soon). But for anyone else, you’ll see this as one beauty school dropout that should go back to high school.