[Review]Michael Jackson: The Experience

[[MC]Ronin[MC]]

 

 

Premiere date: November 6, 2010
Publisher: Ubisoft
Genre: Rhythm game
Platforms: Wii, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PSP, Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo DS, iOS, Mac OS
Developers: Ubisoft, Ubisoft Montreal, Ubisoft Paris, Ubisoft Montpellier, Ubisoft Milan, Ubisoft São Paulo, Ubisoft Shanghai
Modes: Single player game, Multiplayer game

 

 

Michael Jackson: The Experience has been all over the place. The Wii, DS and PSP versions all came out at the end of 2010 and spanned the spectrum from "okay" to "awful." The 360 and PS3 versions have finally shown up to complete the pack. Each version has approached the goal of making Michael's legendary music playable in different ways, and met varying degrees of success.

Michael Jackson: The Experience
 for Kinect was the most promising of the bunch. A dancing game is a perfect fit for the body-tracking hardware. But unlike Dance Central, its competition on Kinect, Michael Jackson: The Experience stumbles at creating an approachable party experience.

Michael Jackson: The Experience has a great premise: dance to the choreography and sing along with hits like Thriller, Billie Jean, Bad, and Beat It. You can play solo or with up to three other players, making it a seemingly easy choice for party play.

 

 

You'll pick a tune and select how you want to play it, but one of the first oddities in Michael Jackson: The Experience is how it handles difficulty levels: there aren't any. You can dance to a song, "perform" a song (alternate between dancing and singing), or attempt a "master performance," which is just a more complex version of a standard performance. But these options aren't available for every track. Some only have a dance option while others offer a vocal performance. If you want to dance to a complicated song, there's no way to scale the difficulty back or change the routine outside of these options.

Michael Jackson: The Experience mimics the gameplay mechanics of Dance Central. Diagrams appear in the corner of the screen to guide you through the routine. This is where Michael Jackson: The Experience goes terribly wrong. These "cue cards" have several glaring issues, chief among them being the manner in which they appear. Instead of sliding up the screen in time with the song, they appear after a small countdown.

This sucks. It's hard to see a timer when you're trying to follow along with the backup dancers, because the diagrams do a terrible job explaining what you're supposed to be doing. Most of the dance moves are complex, full-body techniques that take time to learn. And even if you could devote your attention to the timer, it often displays a different countdown for different moves. One card might start a countdown at four and the next might start at two. It caught me off guard on more than one occasion.

If that isn't confusing enough, some of the diagrams are visually identical but call for different moves to complete. For example, a diagram might appear that requires a slide to the left and then a slide to the right. The same diagram comes back later but requires two sets of slides instead of just one. It's inconsistent.

 

These cue cards are a total mess and the complexity of the moves will scare away casual dancers. Trying out the practice mode won't help much either because you can't slow down any of the sections or get any feedback on your moves.

Singing is equally troubling. I plugged in a USB microphone for any tracks that called for a vocal performance. Although Michael Jackson: The Experience does give you a karaoke-style interface to follow the lyrics with, no pitch gauge is present to help you tighten up your performance. Not that it matters much, because I could essentially talk and hum my way through everything and get near perfect scores.

Multiplayer could have been a saving grace for Michael Jackson: The Experience, but it's just another source of disappointment. Co-op play, which tasks players which switching on and off mid-song, doesn't allow for enough time in-between turns to let players situate themselves. Battle mode is even worse, because one team performs the entire song first and then the other team performs the same song... again. A good multiplayer game doesn't make half the players wait for five minutes before letting them compete.

 

Things start off with a barebones interface that has little structure to it. There are more than 20 songs available in Michael Jackson: The Experience, and each song has its own routine that's based on Michael's original choreography. But there's no progression to work through and no additional modes besides dancing with multiple players. Most of the game feels cheap and hollow compared to titles with similar dance floor offerings. But this empty feeling is, tragically, the least of Michael Jackson: The Experience's concerns.

The biggest problem with Michael Jackson: The Experience is obvious when you consider the Wii's control setup. This platform wasn't designed to read a player's entire body, so a dance game that tasks players with moving their entire body presents an inherent disconnect.

While playing Michael Jackson: The Experience, small diagrams slide up the side of the screen with images of a dance move or pose. Players are supposed to follow these cues as well as mimic the dancers on screen. But because the player's only connection with the game is a single Wii remote, the dancing boils down to waving one's hand around, as any additional movement isn't registered and vanishes into the void of missed opportunities.

When I dance to Smooth Criminal, for example, any skill I exhibit while dancing doesn't factor into my score or star ranking. This means players can wave their hands around and ignore all the other dance moves. But even performing hand motions properly will often result in a miss, which made me feel like I had almost no connection to the game at all.

For those that honestly attempt to dance with their whole body, Michael Jackson choreography is extremely difficult, and there's very little in the way of tutorials here. There are simple instructional videos that teach players specific sections of the songs, but these videos need to be unlocked, which makes very little sense. Anyone uncomfortable with dancing will not be able to follow along with Michael's moves, especially because Michael Jackson: The Experience uses video footage of real dancers superimposed on themed backgrounds.

 

 

Much to my surprise, the dance move cues I discussed above will occasionally disappear during a routine, forcing players to follow the on-screen dancer without any guidance. This startling issue echoes Michael Jackson: The Experience's overarching lack of polish and poor design choices.

Among these poor design choices are the bizarre coloring effects on the in-game characters (used to mask the fact that Michael is not actually performing on camera). Despite the effects -- which render the characters faceless -- I must give credit to all the dancers on screen. They are clearly not the problem in Michael Jackson: The Experience because their dancing is fantastic.

Lastly, it should be noted that most of the tracks in Michael Jackson: The Experience are suitable for a music game, but several of them are terrible for dancing. "Heal the World" and "The Girl Is Mine," for example, are too slow (and corny) to enjoy on the dance floor.
 

 

 

 

Verdict
If you're looking for a fun party game that gets people dancing, Michael Jackson: The Experience is not it. Poorly designed cue cards, nebulous vocal feedback, and bad multiplayer options are critical issues here. The interface and background visuals in Michael Jackson: The Experience are flashy and in some cases impressive. But The Experience doesn’t earn your money, even if you're a hardcore MJ fan.