Review by: Brandon "Hey Ya!" Cackowski-Schnell

There are two types of dancers in this world: the good ones and the not so good ones. The good ones look all hot and sexy as they bust their moves out on the floor with all of the grace and funk of a highly trained professional. Oh how easy they make it look! Oh how mesmerizing they are! Oh how we hate them! By "we", I mean the rest of us, the folks who can either dance a few steps here and there or can't dance at all.

See, we want to dance, we need to dance but when the floor is filled with only the sexy people, well, who wants to compete with that? Who wants to flail and spaz out alongside someone who clearly knows what they're doing? Fellow flailers of the world, your time to dance has come in the form of Just Dance 2, a game that may not do a blasted thing towards teaching you how to dance or even recognizing that you are dancing, but is so infectiously, giddily devoted to making you want to dance that you just won't care. Go away good dancers, you're just going to ruin the fun.

True to its name the game is just dancing. There's no career mode in which your young upstart looks to join the Get Fresh Krew and win the National Dance Off. There aren't any special powers, no Pirouettes of Doom or +5 Pop Locking of Funktitude. There is you, your friends, the song and some of the best choreography you'll see on your TV that isn't being critiqued by some cranky British dude.

As the dancers in the game shake their groove-thing the game will highlight certain gestures that you'll have to mimic. It's usually the simplified ending of a more complicated step however things happen so quickly that your best chance of earning a perfect match is to do the moves as you see them happen in the game. Hit the moves correctly and you'll earn more points, except for all of the times when you don't. As the game is trying to judge your performance in some extremely complicated dance routines by judging where the Wiimote is as it is moved around, clutched in your sweaty hand, the gesture recognition is somewhat spotty. Scratch that, it's downright abysmal. Songs where you nail the moves will net you fewer points than routines in which you moved about as if you just stepped on a high voltage wire. Getting more points in a song seems just as much luck as anything else, however, curiously, the poor gesture recognition does have an excellent benefit in that it encourages you to get your whole body into the routine and not just try and match the hand movements. I don't know if I was scoring better or just having a better time but if you let loose and let the rhythm get you, you'll have a much better experience.

Helping you in your journey towards better living through dance is a combination of some great music and fantastic choreography and dancing that ties directly into the theme of the songs. The song list is as varied as it is well executed with pop, techno, funk, soul, alternative, you name it—all jumbled together in a way that shows that you can dance to just about anything. Some unfortunate covers rear their head but for the most part the music is fantastic. What is even better though is the dance routines made for each song. You'll dance like James Brown for "I Feel Good" bust out your Cossack moves for Boney M's "Rasputin" and make like a starlet for "When I Grow Up" by the Pussycat Dolls.