As I raised my hand to initiate the count for OneRepublic’s Counting Stars, my cat pounced on my ankles and attacked my feet. I don’t blame her; my dance skills are awful. However, Dance Central Spotlight helped me become a little less awful. Hundreds of dance moves and smooth difficulty progression make Dance Central Spotlight a fun way to learn new dance techniques and work out. However, it does miss out on features from past Dance Central games, giving it a stripped down feel by comparison.

Dance Central Spotlight brings the dance series down to its bare bones. Unlike its predecessors, it doesn’t include a story mode or competitive multiplayer. What’s more, if you’re looking for a bit of variety in your music, you’re going to have to buy it because the 10 pre-loaded songs are limited to recent Top 40 hits, such as Happy by Pharrell Williams and Diamonds by Rihanna. In essence, at $10 USD for the base game, Dance Central Spotlight functions as a platform within which you create your own experience through DLC. There’s currently 50 songs available for $2 USD each, or a few dollars more for certain song packs.Despite that though, I never felt short-changed. Each of the 10 songs has eight routines -- Beginner, Standard, Deluxe, Pro, Alternate, Cardio, Strength, and Alternate Pro -- so there’s still a lot of content to get through. Each song starts you off with the Beginner routine, but once you collect enough dance cards by earning a “Flawless” rating on dance moves, you’ll begin to unlock the other routines. Dance Central Spotlight doesn’t have a fail state, so having the collection barrier feels like an appropriate way to pace players into the more difficult routines. Jumping from Beginner to Standard to Deluxe was smooth, as each difficulty felt like it added just the right number of moves to keep it challenging and entertaining.The practice mode accessed by saying “Hey DJ, practice that,” or by pressing the Y button is thankfully still available. In this mode, you can practice a specific dance move at its normal speed or slow it down. It helped me on several occasions when I needed to nail down complicated moves to unlock the next routine. The Xbox One’s Kinect tracks your movements down to a tee, so precision in your moves is key, which is great. I couldn’t be lazy and slack through songs if I wanted to collect enough cards to move on. Instead, I had to really learn each move, which not only made me a better dancer, but also helped prepare me for the more challenging routines ahead.The Fitness mode in Dance Central Spotlight sees the most improvements over past games. Instead of building up a playlist of songs, you choose how long you’d like to dance -- sometime between 10 and 90 minutes -- and then you can select which kinds of routines you’d like perform. Once started, the mode picks random songs from your library and alternates between showing the time of your workout and your estimated calories burned. With the new Cardio and Strength routines, I felt like I got the most out of my time in the Fitness mode since their dance moves are specialized for working out.Not only does Dance Central Spotlight lack competitive multiplayer, but it actually reduces the number of local co-op players from Dance Central 3’s eight back down to two. That doesn’t keep it from being fun though. To start a co-op game, players have to high-five -- what better way to get pumped for a routine than to start your game with a high-five? Jumping in and out of co-op is totally seamless too. If a player leaves or re-enters the Kinect’s field of vision, the song will just keep going while the camera focuses accordingly, all without interrupting the routine. This improved co-op functionality is great, but it’s a shame that Dance Central Spotlight doesn’t capitalize on this with a new online mode or by at least maintaining multiplayer features from past games.