The Just Dance franchise has been going for 8 years now, starting out life on (and being inspired by) Nintendo’s other innovative hardware, the Wii. It’s fitting that the latest game, a launch title for Switch, might have found its perfect home.

The dancing game was a perfect match for Nintendo’s new concept motion controllers back in 2009, it was built around the idea of using a simple control system to copy the actions of dancers on screen while the game ‘tracks’ your movements and scores you based on accuracy. The genius move from Ubisoft was in adding the day-glo choreography from real dancers and in providing multiplayer vs battles to compete against friends. It soon became one of the ultimate party games.

Fast forward through yearly iterations and expansions on the theme, which has seen Kinect and Playstation eye try to copy the same formula (with varying results) and we get to the latest Nintendo console; the Switch. Now there are smaller and more accurate motion sensors, able to track movements far better than the Wii Remotes of old and, more importantly, there are two of them as standard. Instant 2 player games, then.

Add in the ability to take the device around with you and set up the screen almost anywhere and you literally have a party in your pocket. The controllers can be used in the same way, with up to 4 people playing at once if you buy an extra set of Joy-cons, with the main Switch being used as a surrogate TV. The only downside is that you’ll need to connect to Wifi for the full benefit of Just Dance’s online library of hits.

The game itself hasn’t really changed much in the last few years, it’s just been tweaked here and there. Menus on the Switch version are easy to navigate and the tracks on the cartridge range from the recent hits of artists like Ariana Grande and DNCE to the classics like Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now, stopping off at strangeville with Ubisoft’s favourite J-Pop artist, Wanko Ni Mero Mero with her follow up to Chihuahua.

On top of this you get 3 months access to Dance Unlimited, the online streaming library of Just Dance hits from previous games and new titles made especially for the service. This provides a huge range of titles that can be grouped, searched and ordered for a party. Single player and multiplayer based songs with multiple characters can be found throughout this service with a song for almost everyone. It does, of course, require a constant internet signal and I did experience the game dropping back to the menu as the Ubisoft server stopped working, though this only happened once. Once the 3 months is up you can choose to continue subscribing to the service or just use the tracks built into the game.

Controls are improved with scoring feeling like it’s far fairer than previous games, thanks to the Switch Joy-cons being better at tracking movements, not that it really mattered too much in the past at a party, but for those with a more competitive nature it does cut out blaming the game for you losing! Characters are just as wacky as in the previous games, with divers, hippos, hippies and other strange and hilarious choreographed dancers ready to entertain you and the graphics are, thankfully, just as garishly colourful as before.

Just Dance 17 on Switch may not be a complete change for the series but the Joy-con controls and the portability means that the console and Ubisoft’s game are a perfect fit.