Michael Jackson: The Experience Review – In black and white

I’ve been a lifelong Michael Jackson fan so when the opportunity arose to review the new Wii dancing title I couldn’t pass it up.

The family has been playing Just Dance on the Wii for the past couple of months and I was interested to see how this dancing title matched up against the current king.

In truth there are some things that all dancing games can learn from the original king of pop.

The Experience starts off with a very simple menu, you can either get into the dancing or head on over to dancing school to hone your skills.

Since my dancing ability packed its bags and left me a few years back I decided to head on over to the dancing school first only to find that it wasn’t really a school for the game but rather an assortment of video’s to teach us how to dance in real life, like MJ.

In the beginning only 3 warm up video’s are available and then you can unlock the rest of them by completing set challenges in the dancing section.

So of we headed to the dancing section where I found a huge catalogue of Michael’s songs, each one is given a difficulty setting and be warned that even the easy songs are quite a stretch unless you are a professional dancer with rubber limbs.

The dancing mechanism is exactly like Just Dance where you need to hold the Wiimote in your right hand and perform the displayed moves in time with the music.

I found the system to be accurate enough for my liking and if I tried to match the moves in the time given I could generally get them right but once the moves started piling up I was faced with a lot of missed opportunities.

One nice addition is that while you can see your general score on a bar on the left or right you don’t get to see the exact scores until after the game which led to a lot of baited breath and excitement when our score bars were pretty close.

I say “we” because this sort of game is designed for multiplayer and the Michael Jackson Experience has improved on this aspect by not only offering the standard multiplayer dance option but they have also added in a Duo option where you dance with each other by imitating different moves depending on which side you choose.

Generally Duo would mean two but I played with 3 people with me on one side and the other 2 as my ‘partner’.

The other multiplayer option has one group imitating MJ while the others act as the backup dancers which allows the stronger dancers to play on a higher level which was a nice touch.

Overall the game is nicely rounded but at times it did feel like it was missing some great possibilities as in setting your own level independently of the song and it didn’t seem to have any sort of benefit for receiving multiple perfects in a row which was disappointing and takes away from the replay value.

Scoring:

Gameplay: 8/10

It’s a solid dancing game at heart and if you have played one before you know what to expect

Presentation: 6/10

Presentation and graphics is always tough on the Wii since it lacks the grunt we expect from the PS3 and Xbox 360 but Michael Jackson: The Experience is not a good looking game.

Sound: 9/10

If you love the Michael Jackson back catalogue then this game is going to be a great addition to your collect, however if you never got Michael Jackson’s music then this will be a sort of pop hell for you.

Value: 7/10

It’s well priced but at the same time you can only dance to so many Michael Jackson songs in a row before it becomes to much.

Overall (not an average): 7.5

This game is designed for Michael Jackson fans and needs to be taken as such, if you are a fan then this game is good enough to own but this game won’t make you become a fan and there are better dancing titles in the market right now.

Last Updated: December 6, 2010