Just Dance 2024

Halfway through a chorus I had completely botched, arms trailing a half-beat behind the dancer on screen, the game handed me a Gold. I was holding my phone in my right hand and swinging it in roughly the right shape, and it turns out that is most of what the scoring actually reads. That is the honest starting point for anyone weighing this up: the tracking is generous, sometimes comically so, and if you want a rhythm game that punishes sloppy timing and rewards precision, you are in the wrong room. What you get instead is a very well built excuse to be loud and uncoordinated in front of people you like. The loop is unchanged from every entry in the series and it still works. You choose a track, a costumed dancer runs the routine in front of a stylised backdrop, small pictograms in the corner telegraph the next move, and you mirror it. Scoring runs from OK up through Perfect on individual moves and tops out at Megastar for a full routine, which is the number everyone in the room will start chasing by song three. Several players can join at once, each using their own phone as a controller, which is the single best design decision the series ever made. No camera to buy, no calibration ritual, no clearing a precise distance from a sensor bar. Somebody opens an app, scans a code, and they are dancing. The presentation is where the real work went. Choreography is genuinely well designed, the routines are shot and directed with more care than a party game strictly needs, and the mix leans hard on recent chart pop with a rotating spread of older hits and international tracks. Difficulty labelling is useful too: an Easy routine really is approachable for a first-timer, while the hardest charts ask for footwork most people will bail on halfway through. There is a sweat mode that reframes sessions as workouts with rough calorie estimates, playlists sorted by mood and intensity, and a kids-facing set of shorter, simpler routines that are legitimately good for younger players. Used as intended, with three or four people and no dignity on the line, it does one thing better than almost anything else on the shelf. The problems are structural. The base package holds a comparatively small set of songs, and the far bigger catalogue sits behind an ongoing subscription that the menus are extremely keen to tell you about. If you buy this expecting a self-contained library, the shape of the front end will irritate you within a week. Song selection is a gamble on top of that. If the licensed picks miss your group's taste there is no way to bring your own music in, and the routines you do like get memorised faster than you expect. Solo play also runs out fast. There is no progression worth the name, no campaign, nothing to unlock that changes how you play, so one person alone is left grinding star ratings on tracks they already know. Wireless input adds a little latency that most people will never notice and a few will find maddening. And because the tracking is arm-led, the gap between actually performing the choreography and quietly gaming the score stays wide open, which flattens any competitive edge the moment one person works it out. Judge it as furniture for a room with people in it and it is excellent: fast to start, funny within minutes, forgiving to anyone who would never otherwise touch a game. Judge it as a rhythm title you will play alone on a weeknight and it is thin, repetitive, and openly upselling you. Know which of those two you are actually buying and the rest sorts itself out. I would keep it installed for the nights when the house fills up, and I would not pretend it has anything for me on a quiet Tuesday.

Alex · Scout Team

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