Ever since Dance Central kicked off the dancing craze for Kinect players, all the gaming companies have frantically been creating dancing or exercise games to reach the new demographic of more casual gamers on the Xbox 360.  Dance Paradise from THQ is another example of this trend with Universal Music behind it.  Taking another approach to presentation than other dancing titles, Dance Paradise chooses to use your avatar as your on-screen dancing counterpart rather than a representation of you.  It definitely forgoes the realism angle and focuses on providing a more cute approach to the design.  There's no over-reaching narrative attached to the game, but like nearly all music party games, it doesn't require one.

It borrows heavily from Rock Band / Guitar Hero with the interface design.  Just like those games, you have to watch a streaming section at the bottom of the screen for your color-coded dancing ques.  As the song flows along, you have to mimic the avatar poses on each color and string them together to create a fluid dance.  The Kinect captures all of these movements, but there's no direct mapping of your body.  It's simply reading your frame and deciding if you are posing correctly at the right time.  Conceptually, it's simple to learn, but the difficulty ramps up quickly just like the now defunct Guitar Hero.  Also identical to the instrument games, you have a power bar that rises or falls depending on your accuracy.  Once you fill it up, hop up into the air and you will gain a fat multiplier to increase your score even more. 

The gameplay design lends itself to being a great party game, but it isn't a great dancing game.  If anything, you are frantically jumping from pose to pose rather than truly busting a move.  It does provide a bit of a workout, but not as much as Dance Central.  It does work well as a competitive multiplayer game though.  If you are performing well against an opponent in Attack mode, it will become increasingly difficult for them to rebound from the situation.  Perhaps the track will start to skip or the dance moves will flicker away.  Perhaps I can freeze them completely.  Other modes include a simple score comparison mode and a co-operative mode that forces two players to synchronize their movements.  Beyond the multiplayer, you also have 29 achievements to tackle; the majority are related to star ratings or gaining points. 

Graphics:

The color palette is extremely bright and lends itself to the overall cute design based around the XBox 360 avatars.  Your Avatar can be dressed up and dances while you are waving your limbs around in front of the Kinect.  In addition, the music video plays in the background while the player dances, likely a benefit for other guests in the room as tyhe player's eyes have to be glued to the bottom of the screen.  The environments are varied and similar to what you would typically see on the Wii in a Wii Sports style game.  The resolution is definitely good and the menus are designed efficiently for navigation with the Kinect.  

Audio:

Dance Paradise comes with 40 tracks to choose from and the majority of them were released fairly recently.  The selection is rhythm heavy (since this is a dance game) and you will find artists like Gwen Stefani, 50 Cent, Lady Gaga, Cassius, Snoop, The Pussycat Dolls, Fall Out Boy and Mika filling up the track list.  There's some older tracks too, but you will find that pop is heavily supported with hip-hop and rap coming in behind it.  It's also not a family friendly song selection, so be wary of younger players listening to the music.   

Conclusion:

The biggest fault of the game is that it can become extremely repetitive if you are working through the career mode alone.  It's also not specifically a game that will teach you to dance.  It's more of a casual game that's worth bringing out for parties, especially those that are new to the Kinect.  However, the cute Wii-like design and the song selection seem to be at odds with easy other.  If you were to glance at the screen while it was being played, it looks like a family friendly title.  But the song selection is opposite of that approach.  The best crowd for this game is likely 20 somethings that want another dancing game to go with their Kinect system.