I always enjoyed So You Think You Can Dance more than Dancing With The Stars, but over these last two seasons I've found some joy in watching the drama of the show. I pull for Cheryl Burke each season because I love her so. I'm riveted by Cristián de la Fuente – who I'd never heard of before this – and how he tore a muscle, is dancing with only one useable arm right now, and had the best performances of his dancing career this week. Okay, so I'm addicted to the show now, but sadly not this game at all.

Dancing With The Stars puts you in the role of one of the show's famous choreographers and professional dancers, being partnered up with a celebrity who is often born with two left feet. Your professional dancer avatar will be determined based on who you choose to pair with, and though I love Cheryl Burke I didn't want to be playing as a girl dancing with a guy, so instead I chose to partner up with Stacy Keibler who I've always found beautiful and was a great contestant (and the best though she lost) her season.

Once your team is picked you'll then begin your career to win the coveted mirrored disco ball trophy. Each week you'll be given a dance to perform, ranging from the waltz to rumba and others. You'll then be thrown into the choreography part of the game, where you must click on panels on the dance floor, choosing whether to go with an Opening, Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, or Closing move. The idea is to string together a performance that won't take you off the floor and will garner you enough points to stay in the show for just one more week. The system to put your dance together is easy to use, but sadly you have no idea what each type of move is exactly or how it will look.

After you've choreographed your routine you then have to go and actually train in three different areas: balance, showmanship, and skill. You'll improve your skill by pressing left, right, up, or down on your keyboard keys based on the direction of an oncoming footprint. The footprint system plays a lot like Dance Dance Revolution and the moves speed up towards the top of the screen quicker the longer you stay in the competition. Showmanship is improved in a memory game that looks like foot patterns placed on the floor that light up one after another and then require you to repeat the formula. The balance system has your star standing firm with a set of books on their head, and you'll need to place your mouse cursor to either the left or right of your star, depending on which way their stack of books is tilting.

Once you've gone through the three training minigames you'll then get to see your characters perform their routine and then get scores from the judges. If you perform well enough the judges' votes and the votes of the viewer will keep you in and then taking place in the competition the following week and so on and so on until you either win or get voted off.

The first major problem with the game is that as soon as you've gone through one week of the competition then you've gone through them all. The training minigames get slightly harder, but nothing that will really challenge you. The dance styles also change, but as long as you choreograph the routines well enough and perform admirably during the minigames, you shouldn't have to worry about losing the show. The second major problem is that the choreographed dances you make and get to eventually see our absolutely horrible looking. The dances are jagged looking, there is not an effortless flow from one dance move to the next, and during moments when characters should be holding hands, it looks as if they are passing through each other and holding nothing but air.

The dances look horrible because of those errors, but the character models are also atrocious looking, as most of the characters only in passing look somewhat like their real counterparts. A few of the characters look pretty close to the real thing, but not as good as they should. The environments and minigames are also very poor looking, featuring large, expansive areas of nothingness and generally boring looking set pieces. The game also has some terrible audio, featuring some fairly decent songs, but there isn't much in the way of sound effects or even any vocal work at all.

Dancing With The Stars could've been a somewhat fun game had a little more effort gone into it and the gameplay had been mixed up so you aren't forced to do the same thing over and over. As the game is though, however, you're way better off sticking to the television series, which is much better than anything this game could even hope to aspire to.

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