REVIEW: Just Dance 2024 Edition has two left feet
Ready for your next party? Just Dance 2024 Edition is finally here!
A year since the series got a considerable revamp, we’re putting on our dancing shoes once more to see if Just Dance 2024 offers good enough bangers to keep your toes tapping, or send you home from the party early.
It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year, or is it?
A New Era
When playing Just Dance 2024 Edition, I realized review would not be as simple as separating the game from the previous installment, as it’s not a new game all together, but a sort of pack that you download for the new Just Dance platform. As stated in last year’s review, Just Dance moved away from yearly releases and now works as a service. This means that every year you can get new songs, but without buying a whole new game. While this sounds like a great move for a game like Just Dance, a year later it’s actually become the franchise’s biggest problem.
The main issue is the content, as unless you’re a new player, all you get with a new edition is a fresh song list. That may be enough for some people, but considering each release still costs $60, that’s a big financial commitment!
Gimme More, please gimme more content
Modes and Features
New to Just Dance? In this edition, you’ll find new songs, modes, customization options, and a follow-up to the previous game’s story called “Dance with the Swan”.
With 40 new songs, there’s plenty to enjoy like fan favorites Flowers by Miley Cyrus to Latin hits such as Tití Me Preguntó by Bad Bunny. It’s quite a good selection, and if you play with friends or family, it’ll be hard not to sing along (while trying to catch your breath).
Challenge mode is a simple one; you can challenge the routine of other dancers around the world, including friends, and see if you can beat their score. Great if you want to compete with a friend, especially if you aren’t able to play at the same time. Workout is another simple addition which adds a calorie counter to your screen to indicate how many you’ve burned after a session; a perfect feature for those that like dancing to work out!
Then there’s ‘Dance with the Swan’, the sequel to story mode in Just Dance 2023, ‘Enter the Danceverses’. While it’s still mind-boggling that a story mode even exists in these games, it was a fun time seeing the characters follow their adventure and I greatly enjoyed running through it with the family.
And… that’s it. After a year of playing with Just Dance’s new platform, I’d expect the service to have a lot of improvements, modes, and content. Unfortunately, other than a couple of fixes and classic songs being added to the Just Dance+ service (which you have to pay for separately), I didn’t see much.
Fast-forward to today and we have Just Dance 2024 Edition, which should bring new and enticing content to justify its price point, but all you will find is 40 new songs and a couple of new modes that were already available if you have been playing from the start. It’s both sad and funny to say that the story mode seems to be the best thing of this new era of Just Dance.
I Wanna Dance With Somebody, but maybe somewhere else.
Final thoughts
In conclusion, new players will probably get a lot more enjoyment out of this installment, while existing players don’t have much to look forward to. Sadly, this will happen every year from now on as new editions come out. Unless you are a huge fan of the franchise and you need to play the new songs, I’d recommend doing some research on the current edition and choose based on the song list. That way, you will confidently know if this is a party worth going to or if you want to Just Dance somewhere else.
