You know that feeling when you finally get your hands on the BFG 9000 in Doom or the gravity gun in Half-Life 2? It’s a sensation that you’re about to become nigh-omnipotent, able to blast enemies out of existence withlittle effort. It gives you goosebumps.
Harmonix wants you to feel that way about the Macarena or the Hustle.
See, Dance Central 3 is weaponising dance moves. It was all fun and games in the series’ two previous titles but now the arm thrusts and hip gyrations of the rhythm game are ammunition in the war against Dance Crime. In Dance Central 3‘s new story mode, players get inducted into a secret superspy organisation called Dance Central Intelligence. They’re working to thwart the megalomaniacal warlord named Dr Tan who wants to clamp down every dance party ever thrown.
DCI is working to stop Tan and have enlisted players to help find the group’s agents who are lost in the timestream. Those agents — who are members of the dance crews from DC1 and DC2 — have been trying to cull dance moves from crazes from the last few decades.
So, you’ll be hunting down pieces of popular dance crazes like the Hustle in the ’70s, the Butt in the ’80s and the Macarena in the ’90s. These moves will be dispersed throughout different songs, though, and you’ll need to gather then and put them together in a final routine that sends you time travelling back to the present.
You’ll see the goofy fun of the Story Mode in the video above, which shows the beginning of Dance Central 3, followed by groove-powered time-travel and a dance battle that takes place in the swinging 1970s. There’s also some multiplayer on view, which also shows how players will be creating their own weaponised dance moves that opponents will have to replicate in competition. That technology in multiplayer is all new and lets the game capture player performance and generate flashcards in real time.
You’ll notice other tweaks to Dance Central 3, like drop-in drop-out co-op and more original music than ever before. I like the fact that Harmonix isn’t resting on its laurels with their choreography-focused franchise and that they’re pushing the tech and depth of Dance Central 3 to higher plateaus. It’s not just a collection of different songs or moves. It’s a different interpretation of what dance can mean altogether. Not bad for a Kinect game.
Leave a Reply