Just Dance 2020 - 8.5/10

In 2009 the first iteration of Just Dance was released and took the world by storm. I remember it well, as this was the year I attended a birthday party-sleepover thing, danced all night to Cotton Eye Joe and then proceeded to pass out due to overexertion and consuming way too many Bacardi Breezers. Now since then, I avoided the Just Dance games, as I was a 'proper gamer', and doing silly dances and singing was for girls! I was supposed to play games where you fight wars, kill aliens or pretend to be a wizard or something but to be honest, doing silly dances always intrigued me.

Last year, while me and my girlfriend were locked down with the rest of the world, we decided to get Just Dance 2020 to pass some time, and pass time we did. When opening the game you're met with several (three) options for the game to capture your sweet dance moves. We started off using the camera option but moved to the handy Just Dance Controller App option after the camera kept kicking me out of the game so I'd only get half a score. Anyway after we sorted out that issue we got to playing, and let me tell you, we had hella fun, y'all. We danced our little socks off to old school classics such as Old Town Road, Bad Guy, and Baby Shark. But there's the initial set back we found - other than a couple of tracks, we wasn't really invested in the songs included with the game. Don't get me wrong, they're fine songs, but they're all very 'now', and my music tastes lie more firmly in the 'then' category.

Thats when we found 'Just Dance Unlimited', a great service that lets you play every single song that has ever been on a Just Dance game! The catch is that it's a subscription service but at just £3-something a month, it falls right into that money amount that urges players to go 'F*ck it' and click the buy now button. Once you do click that button though, you're graced with over 500 songs to choose from which include classics from all eras. So we started dancing even more passionately than before because now we were actually enjoying the music we were dancing to which, believe it or not, helps! The thing is, once you've got that much choice, you're spoiled for it, like when you were a kid and there was a handful of channels on the TV, you were always watching something, as opposed to having Netflix with a million different options and you can't find a thing to watch.

So we didn't really have a 'purpose' to our dancing, and I know it's a lot to ask of a dancing game to give me purpose in life but it dulled the experience, but don't worry, Just Dance had us covered! World Dance Floor is the online multiplayer element of Just Dance, which pits hundreds (and i mean literally hundreds) of players against each other or lets them team up in tournaments and other fun matches. This really gave us a 'reason' to play the game, it added a lot of excitement into a game that initially felt like something you'd play when you had a bunch of people over into something to play alone, for fun, because you want to improve and beat that pesky Mum_Slayer_XxX from the Philippines that keeps beating you on 'Taki Taki'.

The game is extremely fun, with the added benefit of being a party game and a hell of a workout, it deserves to be in everyones rotation. It does have some set backs in my opinion, including having to pay a subscription to play a larger variety of songs, having the camera constantly kick me out of the game, and some of the dances being absolutely ridiculously hard (although i wouldn't mark it down for that, I'm just salty about not being that good at the game). But these set backs do have positives associated to them, like although it's a subscription service, Just Dance Unlimited still exists and it does make the experience much more enjoyable. And about the camera thing, it really could be my own issue with lights/camera set up, which I solved by using the App instead and now it works great. I've come a long way since playing the first Just Dance, and although I don't play while drinking my own weight in Bacardi Breezers anymore, I have just as much fun, and if you're thinking of getting it as a fun way to work out, consider this a recommendation.

8.5/10