Just Dance 2023 Edition review

It’s easy to forget quite how long the Just Dance games have been around. Since the early days of the Wii this active party game has been entertaining the masses by forcing grumpy parents off the sofa to bust a move. Well it’s back again with a new selection of songs and a new app for your phone, so if you fancy getting active with some (admittedly slightly limited) dance gameplay then Just Dance 2023 is ready to download.

If you’ve been living under a rock since 2009, the Just Dance games involve you dancing along to a routine that a character does on screen. By utilising the motion controls in your connected smart phone you’ll score points based on your accuracy, as long as you’re able to decipher the dance moves running along the bottom of the screen in time and move your body accordingly at least.

Well that’s the theory, but realistically it never really feels like how you move has any bearing on how well you do. This is probably because the game only tracks what one of your hands is doing, and essentially means that it doesn’t really matter how well you dance. You can see why that would be an issue for a dancing game, but it honestly isn’t the end of the world.

Now sure it’d be ideal if the game understood how to score your dancing, but really Just Dance 2023 is about dancing around your living room and looking like an idiot to your favourite tunes. The dances are really well put together, and offer a hell of a workout if you put your all into them. If you’re someone who really cares about improving themselves and getting high scores this isn’t the game for you, but the rest of us will be too busy dancing to Britney Spears to worry about it.

This year’s edition has a great track list with a little something for everyone. From older hits like Disco Inferno and Wouldn’t it be Nice to heavier songs like Linkin Park’s Numb and Evanescence’s Bring Me to Live, a hell of a lot of genres are represented. I can’t pretend that every one of the forty songs appealed to me, but with Ru Paul on the track list I was never going to complain.

It’d be hard to argue that the songs aren’t the most important aspect of Just Dance 2023 edition, but it’s also worth mentioning how impressive the visuals that accompany them are. The background videos manage to tell bizarre and gloriously camp stories, such as a woman getting dragged into a world of dance by a blue boogieing alien and his glowing bouncy ball. The production value on these intros and the dances that follow them is really impressive, with my favourite being an entire song featuring Claymation woodland creatures as your dancing guides.

While the quality of the visuals is undeniable, they bring with them a huge issue. Ubisoft Paris put so much effort into making each song feel like a big budget music video, and sacrificed the clarity of the dancing to do so. Sweeping camera changes distract from the characters you’re trying to copy constantly, and levels that feature less human CGI characters are a nightmare to follow.

The main difference between this year’s Just Dance and previous versions is that going forward Ubisoft are planning on adding songs to this game instead of bringing out yearly instalments. Just Dance+ gives you access to a shed load of extra songs you can stream at any time, which are going to be updated throughout the year. For £3.29 a month or £19.99 for twelve you’ll have access to more dancing content than you could ever need, which is great if you can’t get enough boogieing.

Other new features include online multiplayer (which admittedly I struggle to see the appeal of) and playlists that are automatically generated to suit your tastes. This sounds good in theory, but for some baffling reason there’s no way to make your own playlist. It would be so handy to be able to put all your favourite tracks in one place, but instead I just ended up manually selecting them every single time.

It’s fair to say that there’s more than a few issues with Just Dance 2023 Edition, but there’s one extra personal gripe I have. My partner is a wheelchair user, and upon starting up the game was delighted to see the accessibility menu included an option to only check out the seated dances. The excitement quickly turned to disappointment though when upon selecting this option there were two songs to pick from. The idea that someone with mobility issues has two songs total to “choose” from is frankly embarrassing, and upset my partner more than if there had been none at all.

Just Dance 2023 is a fun rhythm party game to play with friends or family, but as is always the case it just doesn’t feel like the scoring is in any way accurate. Sure dancing around to the fantastic track list is entertaining, but the distracting visuals and poor quality of life options make this a disappointing sequel in a series that can afford to put more effort in.