Grease Dance is a dancing game / karaoke game that incorporates the classic Grease moves and characters. As an avid Grease fan who was in the musical in high school, this concept appealed to me. Here's how the game plays out.

First, despite the cover of the game featuring live humans, the game has cheesy cartoon characters, and the songs are cover songs. The graphics need a bit of work, too. One time during a song Sandy's dress "vanished" and she was dancing in her underwear for a moment. A bit iffy for a game to do.

On the dancing side, there's no training mode and little feedback. So you're stuck trying the game time after time to figure it out. You are forced to play all the easy games before the harder ones unlock. Some are fun, though - they have you do an actual hand jive during that song.

I had numerous problems with the menu selection and with the controller not registering, even though I play a ton of dance games in general. So this game in particular seems to have some coding issues.

The karaoke side has the song but no "singer" - which feels odd. The notes aren't shown well. If a note is held, often the on-screen version just ends. Also, the notes don't go up and down in a reliable way. You could go from a low part to a high part and on the screen it's still "center of the screen". It's also worth noting for parents that some of the lyrics in here are fairly racy, so be aware of the age you're buying the game for.

The mini games are cute but not ones that realy call to be replayed. They claim to have "videos" but really they're super-short clips from the movie without any context, often jammed together in some sort of a strange mash-up.

The icon selection is awful. You have to re-choose your icon for the high score area EVERY SINGLE TIME. Surely they could let you set a profile and use it the entire time you play?

And worst of all, the loading screens are incredibly long. I could go get a glass of water by the time the game comes back again. When I'm dancing I don't want to take super-long pauses between every single song.

So I give them kudos for a nice idea - but the execution is just not up to any other dance game I have nor to any karaoke game I have. I think they were hoping to trade on the "Grease" name and figured people wouldn't care if it was really a good game. Surely the amazing music and dancing of Grease deserves far better than this. I can only hope a new vendor takes this on and comes out with a much better version.

Rating: 2/5 and really the 2 is mostly because the music - even being covers - is so much fun to sing and dance to.

I purchased this game with my own funds for the purpose of doing this review.

Buy Grease Dance from Amazon.com