Zumba Fitness World Party

Genre: Music-Rhythm / Sports (Exercise)

Players: 1

.

Review:

Zumba Fitness World Party, released on the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Wii U in 2013, is a game that uses motion detection to judge your movements to dance along with recorded trainers on-screen. While the Xbox versions of the game had the benefit of using the Kinect camera, the Wii U version goes a different route, but having players strap on a waistband and then insert a Wii remote on the side.

This already means that this game may be a deal-breaker if your frame is too big. To be fair, the waistband here is fairly large, but be aware that it won’t just be you trapped inside it – the Wii remote will also be there, pressed up against you, or possibly pressed into you in the worst-case scenario.

The presentation here is mostly pretty good, using live video (with some clear blue screen/CG work going on in the backgrounds) depicting the game’s various trainers demonstrating the dance you’re meant to be doing. Be aware that you won’t have any control over which trainer you’ll be working out to – each is specific to certain songs/world locations. Speaking of the songs, this game has 40 of them from all over the world (this game is really going for a worldwide theme) across a wide array of genres.

The gameplay is at least nominally straightforward, with players simply having to imitate the dancer on-screen, and with better performance getting a better score. Unfortunately, there’s all sorts of problems with this in practice. First, I’m extremely doubtful that this game is even remotely accurate at detecting body movement, as I saw myself getting miss after miss when trying to do as I was told, yet getting inexplicable successes when just standing in place vibrating on my feet like an idiot.

On that note, let me say that I have never played a single fitness game that made me feel as embarrassed to be playing it as this game. It’s not just the relentless earnest cheerfulness of the trainers, the awkwardness of the game’s poor motion detection, and the crappy self-conscious feeling of the waist band squeezing me. It’s the fact that this game seems to assume every playing is an expert at dance, performing high-speed, high-energy moves right from the start with no warning and giving you the sense that anyone who watched you struggle to try to keep up with all this would be laughing themselves silly. There is a mode in the options menu where you can practice each individual dance step, but the game doesn’t actually name these moves when you’re performing the full dance, or give you any sort of tutorial on stringing them together.

If you’re a Wii U owner looking for a great fitness game, go for the excellent Wii Fit U. If you’re wanting a great fitness game, get Ring Fit Adventure on the Nintendo Switch. And if you want a decent dance game, go for one of the Just Dance games on… well, pretty much any platform. But unless you’re already a huge dance expert, don’t bother with Zumba Fitness World Party – it won’t make you a great dancer, it won’t make you work off all your calories, it’ll just make you feel like an idiot.

tl;dr – Zumba Fitness World Party is a Music-Rhythm game with a focus on exercise that has players dancing to burn off calories. The presentation here is pretty good, but the game does a terrible job showing players how to perform the actual dances, and not everyone is going to be able to use the required strap. Even if you do, the motion sensing capabilities of this game are dubious at best. No matter what you wanted out of this game, you’ll find something better elsewhere.

Grade: D+

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Andy Miller, Exlene, Johannes, Homer Simpin, Ilya Zverev, Eli Goodman, Kristoffer Wulff, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Francis Obst, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}