APS: Dance Central Spotlight

While the new Kinect with Xbox One has seen some love since its release, many feel that it hasn't had that 'it' title. One of the titles looking to pick up that mantle is Dance Central: Spotlight, the latest in the Dance Central franchise by Harmonix. If you know anything about these games in term of achievements, however, you'll know that a full 1000G isn't gifted to you - it's going to require some serious effort. With this week's Achievement Preview Spotlight, we'll see if we can get a sense of whether the digital-only offering will require the same effort as earlier titles. Before diving into specifics, we'll just point out here that Spotlight includes 35 achievements valued at 1000G.


First off, the game looks like it would make an easy Bean Dive candidate as it rewards the player for completing the game's introduction and for 'being identified by biometrics'.




At this early stage in the game's tracking, there is no achievement that *everyone* has, but it appears that the first achievement is a tutorial, and one is simply the game recognizing the player, and both of those will likely happen as a matter of course.

Beyond those achievements, and one to switch between dancer characters, the rest are all about dancing. Like many Kinect games, there are a couple achievements for playing with a friend. There's also one for playing for seven straight days.

The meat of Dance Central Spotlight's list is tied up in the various routines that are available for each song packaged with the game. In fact, as noted during the game's reveal, each song has different routines associated with it, including Strength, Beginner, Cardio, Serious, Standard, Polished, Classic, and Goofy. Some of the achievements reward the player for a playing specific routines with specific characters...






... While others will reward you for collecting one or all routines of a certain type.






While there are others odds and ends, the other major achievement type is focused around collecting moves. Those of you familiar with Dance Central know that each move is shown on a small dance card as you have to perform it. It seems a portion of Spotlight is centered around collecting these moves, including ones for collecting a certain number of moves...





... And ones for collecting specific moves.




All in all, the list doesn't look quite as trying as the core titles, though that's dependent on how difficult gold starring moves is, as there is one achievement that requires gamers to get gold stars with each character. There is only one other star-rating specific achievement, and it only requires three stars on a specific routine. Though Kinect games will always have a certain amount of difficulty tied into the fact that they require the player to get up and move, it seems like this particular dancing game should be an obtainable completion for those familiar with the franchise.

Dance Central: Spotlight will be available to download tomorrow, September 2nd, on Xbox One for $9.99 or regional equivalent. The game will include 10 tracks, and additional ones can be purchased for $1.99 each. The game will support importing of songs that were previously purchased for earlier Dance Central titles.