Sweet Sixteen: The Evolution of a Dance Icon
Just Dance turns sweet 16 this year and we’ve seen it blossom from a simplistic attempt at a dance game with just a few songs to choose from, boring backgrounds and simple animation to what it is today – a full blown dance extravaganza with hundreds of songs in its back catalogue, a range of different music genres and dazzling visuals.
But with so many familiar features returning year after year, it raises the question: has Just Dance already reached maturity, or can Just Dance 2026 Edition still bring something new to the dance floor?
Let’s start off by looking at what’s familiar.
Nostalgia, K-Pop, and Bluey: The Song Library
Songs are listed on the ‘Songs’ page, where the new Just Dance 2026 Edition tracks appear at the top by default. You can also sort songs by difficulty, effort or score, and filter them by choreography style, genre, mood, decade or accessibility – which makes finding your next routine easy (especially if you’ve got Just Dance+ and access to its massive library of over 400 tracks).
Buying the game gives you one month’s access to Just Dance+, while the Deluxe Edition includes three months and the Ultimate Edition offers a full year – all available via the Xbox Store.
Once your subscription expires, you’re left with the 40 songs bundled with Just Dance 2026 – but that’s still a solid mix. As usual, Lady Gaga and Dua Lipa feature prominently with two songs each, alongside recent hits like Good Luck, Babe! by Chappell Roan, Anxiety by Doechii, and Messy by Lola Young. Rounding out the playlist are nostalgic classics (Girls Just Want to Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper), K-pop (DRIP by BABYMONSTER), and Latino beats (La Bamba). A few songs come with alternate versions, offering variations in difficulty, visuals or number of dancers – the disco classic Born to Be Alive, for instance, has both Halloween and aerobics themes.
Ubisoft have also scored a bit of a coup by pairing up with kids’ favourite – Bluey. One song features Bluey and her family as they dance around their house and neighbourhood. If you have kids under 10 then this is sure to be a big hit.
We’re going to have to assume that as Just Dance has been around for 16 years, most people are familiar with how to play. It starts with downloading the Just Dance Controller app and then pairing your game with the app. This then turns your mobile device into a controller, which allows you to interact with the game interface and also act as a motion sensor to track your movement. You follow the movements of your coach on the screen and are awarded with scores of how closely you mimic them.
Of course, this is never going to be very accurate so Ubisoft have come up with a solution to this, which leads us to our first new feature – the Just Dance Camera mode.
The Camera Conundrum
This was still in beta mode in Just Dance 2025 but now comes to us in its fully tested form. To many, this will be a selling point of the game. Since waving a fond farewell to Microsoft’s Kinect, dance games just haven’t been the same for people who are actually good at dancing and want their expertly timed movements of their body tracked so they are achieving accurate scores. For those of us who are not so choreographically-blessed, we quite liked the fact that waving our right hand that is clutching our smartphone roughly in time to the music allowed us to rack up decent scores and make us feel like a dancing semi-god. This was always the joy of Just Dance – it never took itself too seriously and let everyone join in the fun, no matter their skill level. For the sake of this review, we set our egos aside and decided to give Camera Mode a try.
First up – compatibility issues. For some reason, despite having the prerequisite Android 9 and above installed on our phone, we were told that it was not compatible and couldn’t use camera mode. So, we tried another phone. This time we were told at first that we had wifi network errors even though both the phone and Xbox were connected to the internet. Plus we had quite a few random crashes where we had to shut down the game and the app and start again. And we’re not the only ones having issues with a poor 1.9/5 star rating on the Google Play store.
If you do manage to connect to the app – and your phone passes the compatibility test – you can select Camera Controller Mode when starting a song. You’ll then need to place your phone on a suitably high surface in front of you and hope the app successfully detects your body. We found that bright, even lighting was essential for it to work properly. While Camera Controller Mode does feel slightly more accurate than the traditional handheld method, it still can’t quite match the precision of the old Kinect days – there is zero indication in the game about how accurate your movements are, in case you wanted to make improvements, and it seems that flailing your limbs in roughly the right direction will still earn you a decent score.
Dr. Gigavolt and Party Mode: New Game Features
The only other new feature that Ubisoft have brought to the Just Dance Franchise this year is Party Mode. This sees players teaming up to dance in a series of snippets of songs to help the character Dr Gigavolt (who reminds us of a benign and more flamboyant Dr Robotnik of Sonic fame) crack the formula for perfect dancing. Now, I’m not sure if we are quite the test subjects he’s looking for, but nonetheless we had a go.
The premise is that you join up to 6 local players and take part in a series of songs where you need to achieve increasing high scores to progress. You get to choose the difficulty of the dances – easy, medium or hard, and the duration: 10, 20 or 30 minutes. The duration will influence how many dances you have to compete in – 5, 8 or 12 and the length of snippets from each song, which ranges from 1.5 – 2 minutes long. This differs from using the normal playlists that are supplied as part of the game in a few other ways.
First off, you get to choose each song from the Just Dance+ catalogue via a shuffling jukebox. Don’t like what’s been picked? Select ‘shuffle’ and another will be offered.
Plus, during gameplay, you’ll face random ‘disruptions’ – monsters appearing mid-routine, screen blurs or colour shifts designed to throw you off. There are also small sections where you are asked to perform one of three specific actions rather than dancing: shaking your phone, clapping or doing absolutely nothing, a bit like a dancing version of Simon Says. We didn’t feel that these added anything to the party feel as they stopped the flow of the dancing, plus clapping while holding a phone is as awkward as it sounds.
Even though this is touted as a party game with multiple players, not all songs feature multiple coaches, so you’ll often find yourselves all dancing as the same character. This doesn’t affect the gameplay – it still works perfectly well, and everyone gets their own score – but it does take a little shine off the intended party atmosphere.
More of the Same Party Fun with Technical Stumbles
Just Dance 2026 Edition offers more of the same party fun that we have come to expect of the franchise with the addition of what should have been an exciting new development – camera controller mode. However, we were decidedly underwhelmed, not only because of the issues with the Just Dance Controller app but the fact that it seems to do nothing to improve the dancing experience or improve accuracy of scoring.
In our opinion, If Just Dance is to keep the rhythm going for another 16 years, it needs to bring something truly fresh to the dance floor.
Important Links
The Annual Dance Party is BACK With Just Dance 2026! – https://www.thexboxhub.com/the-annual-dance-party-is-back-with-just-dance-2026/
Just Dance 2026 Edition is Coming This October with 40 New Tracks – https://www.thexboxhub.com/just-dance-2026-edition-is-coming-this-october-with-40-new-tracks/
Buy Just Dance 2026 Standard Edition – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/just-dance-2026-edition-standard-edition/9NTTPT6PC2FT/0010/9TGKWZ12QXNR
Or a Deluxe Edition – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/just-dance-2026-edition-deluxe-edition/9MTCBDDZTHFB/0010
Alternatively go big with the Ultimate Edition – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/just-dance-2026-edition-ultimate-edition/9np9zbsj9htj
