Hannah Montana: Spotlight World Tour

Rating Everyone Genre action Publisher Disney Interactive External Links Official Disney Interactive Website

Hannah Montana: Spotlight World Tour is the topic in this review. My initial thought was, "What?!? I have to review, What?!?" I was all like, "NO WAY!" Once the shock wore off, I started playing the game and, as I suspected, I turned out not to be a fourteen year old girl. With that in mind, I shall press on...

A good deal of your time spent in Hannah Montana: Spotlight World Tour is on stage guiding Hannah through different dance routines while she sings a selection of her hit songs for the masses. All of Hannah's moves are controlled with both the Wii Remote and the Nunchuk. Nunchuck is a fitting description in this case, as you better have ninja-like executions with the device or the moves tend to fail. At some points, you have to deal with a good bit of controller lag. Depending on your level of decency, there are enough moves to create the third exciting installment to the Lambada franchise.

As a Hannah dances away on the upper part of the screen, a flurry of color-coded icons stream across the bottom, indicating the requisite moves you'll need to pull off (this is a good time to work on that ninja-like precision I mentioned earlier). It is similar to, but not quite as good as DDR in that respect. The star-based scoring system is a straight rip from Guitar Hero.

Hannah Montana: Spotlight World Tour features nine areas to tour. Locales include Tokyo, London, Paris, and other major cites where their kids are smarter than ours. Each tour stop level requires you to perform three or four numbers, which unlocks more tour stops. Among the songs featured are fourteen older Hannah Montana tunes, in addition to two songs from her latest CD. How do I know that? I looked it up on the Internet. So sue me, I'm not a fan.

Aside from dancing there is a good deal of shopping and dressing room adventures where you can do some basic "character customization". There are a few complexity-free mini-games, which are the Wii equivalent to DS mini-games. The game makes attempts at humor complete with a cheesy laugh track and scripted character sketches that fall into the domain of the very young.

The visuals aren’t much to look at and are probably close to PS2 quality. The audio is actually pretty good, but the character models and animation distract for the overall aesthetic. The game also seems to slow down at odd times, which is especially annoying when you're trying to really nail that spin. The game lacks any real depth and will probably not entertain anyone more than hardcore Hannah Montana fans, though you can't blame the designers for the simplicity of the game considering the target audience.

Hannah Montana: Spotlight World Tour does its job by drawing the money out of new teens and their parents with cult-like efficiency. This is probably why teenagers in other countries actually know stuff aside from shopping and choosing the right boots. In the end, as with most niche games, it’s a surefire pleaser with the target crowd and will probably do well in that regard. I doubt that it will be the last game in the Hannah Montana franchise.

No CGI mannequins were harmed during the play testing of this “Achy Breaky Misuse of Advanced Motion Sensing Technology.” Cheers!