Review by: Jenn Cutter

It was not a surprise when Konami, creators of Dance Dance Revolution, announced that a dance game for the Kinect was in the works. It is a surprise that Konami seemed to give up at some point in the development process and just released the game without any polish. DanceMasters employs the Kinect well, tracking player movements without issue, but the whole experience ends up feeling underwhelming as you discover the lack of options for play and customization.

As you advance through the difficulty levels, you'll have to stay in step with the on-screen action to succeed. Successfully replicating moves builds your Dance Gauge and lets you access the Parallel Universe. Here's an example of Konami hitting a neat idea but implementing it in a frustrating way—once the gauge is full, you've got to hold your right hand over the icon on the lower right of the screen. This causes a meter to grow all the way around the circle and, once it's complete, you swipe your hand upwards to trigger the switch. Of course, if you miss any steps while building the meter, your combo will end, the gauge decreases, and you'll have to earn back up to full to try again.

Activating the Parallel Universe greatly increases your score and it's the only place to find secret ripples. These are discovered by mirroring the dancer as close as possible, whether or not there are on screen prompts, in the hopes that you'll hit one. Finding the time to build the meter in Standard mode is not a challenge, but Extreme and Stealth modes turn it into a battle of wills between you, the camera, and the game. Unless conditions are perfect, my money is on the game winning. At the time of writing, a final Master mode is still unavailable to play. At some point Konami plans to release this mode as DLC, but there has been no confirmation about when, whether it's free or not, and what it will entail.

DanceMasters is not a master of variety and Konami even points this out, possibly unintentionally, on its own site: "Choose from different modes to give yourself the ultimate Dance experience: Dance Mode". Maybe there was supposed to be a second mode at one point, but player selectable options are few. You can play alone, with a friend beside you, floor space permitting, or online. The only real choices come from selecting the song and what difficulty you want to tackle. They offer some pre-made setlists -- which you'll have to achieve a top score on in order to unlock Stealth mode; dancing the routine without any on screen prompts -- or you can just select songs individually. It's disappointing that there's no way for players to make their own setlists, if only to avoid having to navigate through the menus constantly.

Songs are short and you're going to spend a lot of time scrolling through the menus. I found it necessary to head for the options in order to turn off the live preview of my dancing and the snapshot mode. These snapshots save your poses so that you can compare forms and, for the brave, share them with your friends. The frozen grainy image of me popping up on the left with the low-quality live preview on the right did not mesh with the look of the game and was just distracting.