Honestly what needs to be said about a game like this to convince you whether or not to buy it? It's an old school dancing game based on the King of Pop. You've likely either picked it up when you got the Vita or you aren't interested in it at all. But for those of you on the fence or waiting on a price drop I guess we can come up with something for you.

Michael Jackson: The Experience has a very simple premise. You control the King of Pop's plastic looking avatar as it dances around on screen. Rather you don't control it so much as you tap and swipe on the screen along with said avatar, trying to time it perfectly to score enough points to unlock the various collectables scattered around the game. Icons pop up on the screen and you tap along with them or swipe in the indicated direction. That is basically the entirety of what you're getting here so it's up to the content to validate your purchase. Sadly that isn't really the case.

See the problem with this game is that it is just seriously lacking in variety. The game comes with 15 songs, one of which isn't even a real Jackson song (one of his post-mortem releases). That's about half of what you get if you buy the game on the Wii, PS3 or Xbox 360. Half! At the time of this writing there are seven songs available as DLC but that does nothing to change how cost effective this package is, or rather isn't. Paying $39.99 for 15 songs isn't exactly a solid purchase unless you're a huge enough of fan of Michael Jackson as well as repetition.

The game clearly expects you to play through each song on every difficulty level until you have mastered it then redo the songs with various "gloves" equipped. Since these do things like let your mistakes not count or multiply your score to better complete the challenges they do add something to the experience. Unfortunately these are unlocked by completing certain challenges but as the game doesn't clue you in on which ones you will likely finish most of the challenges before even getting them which renders them mostly redundant.

Another problem is that the dances themselves can be quite disappointing. It isn't exactly easy to get Michael to do some of the more complicated moves in freestyle mode so you might just miss signature moves of a particular dance. To top it off almost all of the songs are missing back-up dancers of any type which means dances like Smooth Criminal and Thriller lose a lot of their impact based solely on the fact that Michael is going solo. Thriller especially loses a lot of its punch without at least a few zombies dancing with him.

The game tries to gussy itself up to present a pretty picture for the user but even this has issues. Before and after most of the songs you will get a short cutscene that emulates the music video for the song. Unfortunately MJ looks like he's made out of plastic in these and there is a good bit of laziness to be seen. For example his mouth never moves during these scenes even when it should and his animations are kind of lazy, being very stiff and stilted. He moves just fine during the dances themselves but he's oddly stiff during these cutscenes.

All of this stuff adds up to make the handheld package for this title just far too iffy to recommend at the moment. Personally speaking I enjoyed the game a good deal and have continued to play it since release. But at a later point, once the price has dropped, this title is definitely something that any PS Vita player looking for a fun diversion should pick up. With how easily this can be played in short bursts it makes the game fairly ideal for short bursts of playing, such as when traveling or trying to ignore your relatives.