The rhythm is going to get you, or maybe it won’t.

Made exclusively for XBLA Kinect, Rhythm Party has fun graphics and special effects and is good to get your blood pumping. Although Konami is no stranger to the dance genre, this is only their second attempt at a Kinect dance game. With such a poor song selection and vague game play description this game made me feel like leaving the party early.

Single Player

Rhythm Party is a very basic game: choose a song, move around and hit targets at the same time it aligns with a dot. The game play is what you would expect from the developers of the Dance Dance Revolution games and is fun for a short time. To make the game more challenging, “tricks” have been added to help you gain more points and so your image on the screen can gain special effects like your body parts turning into speakers. However, the description of the tricks is really vague and it wasn’t until I started playing the game that I realized that “step trick” was just moving your feet and “turn trick” was just turning. Not what I would think of as a trick. There are also trick challenges which you can achieve by completing a set number of a certain tricks in a song.

 
The game is set up with six options for what your image looks like and four levels of difficultly for each song that need to be unlocked. However, with only ten songs to choose from, and most of them not being particularly familiar and as of yet no options for content downloads; I lost interest quickly. I love to dance around my house with no set choreography and would even like to do that in a game like this one, but I have to know and like the songs in order to have fun dancing around on my own. I wouldn’t mind the sad song selection so much if it were a game with set choreography. If I were able use my own songs like in Lips, this game would have an amazing edge over the competition.

The Kinect sensor picks the player up really well in Rhythm Party and navigation is good as well. However, if you are even slightly out of the game play area, which happens easily as you flail around, the game pauses. This made me have to stop dancing and resume the game frequently at first. Once I moved my couch and took a few steps back it didn’t happen as often.

 

Multiplayer

There are no multiplayer modes in Rhythm Party.

Closing Comments

The game play in Rhythm Party was quite fun for the first 20 minutes or so and is a great concept, but the mediocre song selection has made the replay value plummet. I may play this game again if I feel like doing my own thing, but if I want to dance I will probably pop in one of my other dance games. As far as party play goes, this game wouldn’t even be an option. Rhythm Party has potential, but I would only buy it if it were on sale.

Score: 5/10