Country Dance for the Wii – review

Dust off your dancin’ boots, grab your pardner, and get ready to dance to 25+ of the greatest country hits of today and yesterday, interacting with the dancers on your television screen as you play the latest Nintendo Wii game, Country Dance! It’s a fun way to spend quality time with your family, learn some country dance moves, enjoy your favorite tunes, and get a good aerobic workout, too! I have seen reviews for this latest game from GameMill Entertainment that are across the board. People seem to either love it or hate it, with a few scattered ratings in between the two extremes. What is the real scoop on this game? Is Country Dance for the Wii the perfect game for you, or is it a dud?

How you feel about Country Dance will probably depend on how much you like country music, how much you like to dance, and your previous experiences, if any, playing other Wii games involving dancing. Also, it really helps if your other family members like country music and dancing (though you can play the game solo), because any dancing game is generally more fun with several people. I admit that I suck at this one and the other two my daughter has, Michael Jackson: The Experience and Just Dance II (at least in comparison to her), but they are all fun games, regardless of my lesser skills at bustin’ a move.

While each of these dancing games are fun and can be enjoyed by the entire family, Country Dance is the one that I think might be most easily learned by both younger kids and older adults. That’s because when you play the game at the lower difficulty levels, most of the moves are somewhat slower than those of the other games I mentioned, and the moves are not as complex. As your skills improve, you can play the game at the higher difficulty levels.

There are four game types to choose from when you play. There is Normal, Perfection, Stop N Go, and a Practice mode. The Normal is the regular mode, where you mirror the dance moves you see performed by the on-screen characters. In the Perfection mode, only Great move ratings score points. The Stop N Go mode is Country Dance‘s version of Just Dance II‘s “Simon Says” mode. When the screen shows a red Stop sign, and you hear the sound of a needle scratching a record, this signals that you’re supposed to stop dancing, and freeze your movements. Any movement you make until the Stop sign goes off the screen results in a deduction of points from your overall score. The Practice mode is self-explanatory; you play a tutorial level to help you review the basics of the game.

What’s more, you have the option of choosing how many rounds your game will last. In other words, you can play games that last 1, 3, or 5 rounds. You can select which song to dance to before each round, or choose Surprise Me and then the game randomly selects one or more songs for you, depending on how many rounds you desire to play. So, you can get in a quick game between shows you want to catch on TV, or play longer games when you have more time to get your groove on.

Now, to the important part of this review: What singers and songs are included with the game? I won’t name all of the 18 performers and 25+ songs, but some of them you can dance to are Alan Jackson’s “Chattahoochee,” Carrie Underwood’s “Cowboy Casanova,” Sugarland’s “Stuck Like Glue,” Trace Adkin’s “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,” Rascal Flatt’s “Life Is A Highway,” Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” Brooks & Dunn’s “Boot Scootin’ Boogie,” Darius Rucker’s “Alright,” Josh Turner’s “Why Don’t We Just Dance,” Easton Corbin’s “A Little More Country Than That,” Dierks Bentley’s “What Was I Thinking,” Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman,” Tracy Byrd’s “Watermelon Crawl,” Toby Keith’s “A Little Less Talk,” and Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “I Feel Lucky.”

Does the game have any drawbacks? As I mentioned, Country Dance‘s reviews have been “across the board.” Some reviewers have expressed their opinions that Country Dance, to them, has moves that are repetitive. I would agree that this is a drawback of the game, though it also makes it more easy to learn and to play for a wider age group than Michael Jackson: The Experience or Just Dance II.

I’d say that of the three, mainly based on the type of music I usually listen to, I’d rank them in order of preference: Just Dance II, Michael Jackson: The Experience, and then Country Dance. But, that’s because while I like listening to some country music, it’s not what I most often listen to on the radio. Also, though I am far from being a dancing machine, I like trying to do some of the more complex dance moves of the other two games, even if I fail miserably at duplicating them.

Country Dance for Nintendo’s Wii is a fun dancing game chock full of great country music to kick up your boots to, and it’s a game the whole family can enjoy playing. It’s easy to learn how to play, which is an added plus, and its four modes of playing the game help keep it entertaining to play for hours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an expert or a novice at dancing, Country Dance has playing modes and difficulty levels that make it possible for any age group to make this game one of their faves. If you’re a fan of country music, and get into dancing (or would like to learn how to be a better dancer), then you should definitely check out Country Dance by GameMill Entertainment today!