Geekscape Games: ‘Dance Central Spotlight’ Takes A Familiar Stage

While everyone was talking about Halo this and Master Chief Collection that after Microsoft’s E3 presentation, all of that was drowned out for me by the announcement of a sequel to the best game for the Kinect in Dance Central Spotlight. After moving on to Fantasia: Music Evolved, (which was great in its own right if our E3 preview from last year has anything to say about it), and publicly stating that Rock Band and Dance Central were on hold for the time being, I was expecting to have to wait A LOT longer before we’d see the dance game take advantage of the Xbox One’s upgraded tech. Though on a smaller scale, I was excited to see the game make a comeback, and was one of the first I took for a spin at on the show floor.

Featuring five songs on the demo version, including Wake Me Up by Avicii, Talk Dirty by Jason Derulo and 2 Chainz, Show Me by Kid Ink and Chris Brown, Counting Stars by One Republic and Happy by Pharrell Williams, (as if you couldn’t escape that song as is), each one has all of the full body choreography you’d expect from the series, with old and new moves alike to put your dance skills to the test. While playing, I didn’t notice any real performance improvements based on the reportedly superior Xbox One Kinect, there were never any points where I felt like the game wasn’t picking up my movements, especially with so much going on in the background.

What I did notice however, was a dip in frame rate compared to its prequels. I get that this is a download title instead of a full release, and is a much smaller game, (promising 10 core songs on top of weekly DLC instead of the 30+ from before), but it was distracting to notice the game looking so choppy in comparison to the fluid animations I was used to. It doesn’t affect game play at all, but its a noticable downgrade compared to the games released last generation. While this game isn’t the only guilty party, this seems to be continuing the trend of supposed “next-gen” games that perform worse than titles released years ago.

Having said that, this may either be the case of a smaller title having a smaller budget or pre-production kinks that need to be ironed out. In the end, all I really care about is solid dancing with catchy songs that get my feet moving, and even with half the songs available on the demo, Spotlight has that in spades. Even with a smaller playlist, a larger emphasis on fitness routines and eight routines per song promises that we’ll get a lot more milage per song than in the prequels.

Get ready to plug your Kinects back in! Dance Central Spotlight is coming exclusively to Xbox One digitally in September.