Just Dance Kids takes the same basic mechanic made popular in Ubisoft’s Just Dance and Just Dance 2 in a package tailored just for toddlers, kids and tweens.
To play the game, you simply need to hold the Wii-mote in your right hand and mimic the actions of the dancers onscreen. When a big move is coming up, a stick figure illustration will scroll in from the lower right side of the screen to help prepare you. It’s a very simple control scheme that 3 year olds (and 73 year olds) can play go along with.
The game features a mixture of songs that are targeted for young kids, older kids as well as ones for the whole family. Preschoolers will love recognizing songs such as Happy Birthday, The Alphabet Song and The Wheels on The Bus, as well as music from the Wiggles and from Yo Gabba Gabba. Kids and Tweens are presented with a pretty broad selection, too, ranging from the Jackson Five to the Beach Boys to Smashmouth. A feature in the song selection menu allows families to easily filter the types of songs they can play in case they’d only like to see the songs for younger kids or older kids.
Once you select a song, up to four players can play at once, trying to match the onscreen dancers. Each song features a group of three kids on screen all dancing the same routine, often in funny costumes to match the song. Before each game, players can jump into the action by pressing A and B at the same time on the Wii-mote. We ended up selecting a few songs in a row with different amounts of players, and we weren’t able to figure out how to drop players other than going back to the main menu.
There are also three different ways to play each game, the regular dance party mode as described above is the first one. The second mode is called Freeze and Shake, and players will at times be asked to either freeze entirely or shake the Wii-mote. We had a little trouble with this mode as the icons for freezing and shaking only appear over the players score area, which is often NOT where you are looking since you are watching the onscreen dancers. It would have been nice if these commands would have been more eye-catching or taken up a bigger part of the screen. The third mode you can play is the Team mode, in which players combine scores and are working together. Every song can be played in any of the three modes, and switching between them is easily selectable from the menu screen.
Just Dance Kids is a ton of simple dancing fun that will have kids of all ages up ready to play along. Although there are scores for each player, and a “winner” is declared after each song, the game isn’t that exact in its measurements for if you are dancing “good” or “perfect.” Our family personally has no problem with this, and we think that the real fun in this game is seeing everyone in the room up, moving and smiling as they dance to the music. We definitely recommend this as the perfect Just Dance game for toddlers, and something that families with kids and even tweens will enjoy as well.