Preview: We Dance

15 Jun, 2011

It’s hot today. Seriously hot. That wishing-I-was-anywhere-but-in-a-tube-train-and-seriously-can’t-that-guy-smell-himself? kind of hot. If I wasn’t so bloody lazy I give the Underground the slip entirely and walk the last mile … but, alas, I am that lazy, and so in the train I stay, nose pressed up one of the most unappealing armpits I have ever had the misfortune to encounter.

I wish I was making this up.

But onwards and upwards! Today I’ve been invited along to put a brand new dancing game through its paces and if I’m honest, not even this kind of sticky weather can hold me back. I grew up on a meticulous diet of Dance Dance Revolution and spent days (weeks? months?) of my life trying to ace the expert mode of my favourite tunes, contorting my then much lither frame into those gravity-defying moves. These days? Well, these days, things are not quite the same. Time (and gravity) have played their part, but I don’t let that dampen my enjoyment. As I hot-step it to the venue – and as much of a self-professed lazy ass as I am – I can’t help but feel a brief shudder of expectation. I’m really looking forward to this.

We Dance, the latest IP to come from We Sing developer Nordic Games, has intrigued me since it was first announced. No, it’s not because of the setlist – although I have to admit, touting both pop favourites and a handful of heavier dance tracks, it’s pretty damned good – but rather because of its shameless twist on what we’ve come to expect as the usual functionality of today’s dance motion games.

See? Told you it was intriguing.

After a designated warm-up – something obstinately (and surprisingly) missing from some other dance titles – my glamorous partner and I step up to the plate. And by plate, I mean: dance-mat.

Yep, that’s right – you read me correctly. We Dance comes equipped with a dance-mat to use in conjunction with your Wiimote. I repeat: INTRIGUING.

I’d like to tell you that the dance-mat has been reinvented for 2011 – that today it ships with new super-awesome features that make the dancemats of old look like … well, like crummy old plastic mats. But if I did, I’d probably be lying. That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad thing, though! The mat is every bit as responsive as my memory serves, and now that each routine can be twinned with your Wiimote to monitor your arm movements as closely as your legs, you can be sure of a more enjoyable – if slightly trickier – routine than your DDR days.

If you’re not acclimatised to a dance mat (read: are much younger than me), don’t fret. We Dance offers up three modes from which to choose; arms only, legs only and, predictably enough, both arms and legs – easy, medium and hard respectively. As you might imagine, arms only means you simply need to match your arm movements to those on screen by way of the Wiimote just like genre-heavyweight Just Dance – so it’s entirely possible to jump right into the game and get going without any prior experience.

But is it actually any easier? I’ve yet to decide. Maybe it’s because I’d grown used to a mat, but to me, the arm movements were trickier to master than the feet-only moves. After all, there’s limited scope of where – and in what combination – your feet need to go. For your arms the sky’s the limit, and with the on-screen avatars flailing around their oddly elbow-less arms so smoothly, I never seemed to catch up with them. There seems little natural co-ordination of feet and arms movements in the more advanced routines I sampled (think less instinct and more choreography) so to ace a challenge, you really have to concentrate.

Thankfully, and as you might well expect, We Dance offers a smorgasbord of tracks from which to select, and they all range from the beautifully simplistic to the insanely complex. What you can’t do, unfortunately, is select your favourite track and twin it with your chosen difficulty; all are locked in, which means to dance about to the Spice Girls you need to be considerably better than me. Thankfully, the easier routines and surprisingly addictive mini-games should be manageable for even the smallest twinkle-toes, so there’s no reason why anyone in the family can’t play. Yes, honestly. And thanks to the four-player functionality – and providing you have enough room! – you can even do so all at once.

Looks like my beloved DDR mat – ripped and abused and still routinely yanked out from under the sofa – can finally retire.