Chances are good if you watch a lot of day time television or still live with your mother you’ve encountered the latest mega fitness craze called Zumba. Like Tae Bo, pialtes and that ab roller frame thing before it, Zumba promises a fun and exciting way to sweat profusely and regret living on a diet of fried chicken and cigarettes. My first experience of Zumba, because I don't watch day time television, was walking my dog past the local community centre and seeing it packed wall to wall with old ladies grinding and popping while a young man with bike pants and frosted hair waved his arms and shouted encouraging words at them. My initial fears of uncovering some kind of secret pensioner ladies strip club was quashed when I vaguely recognised the logo on the sprite young mans sweat band was the same one as a weird Kinect review game I had at home. So my research into Zumba and spanish aerobics began.

Expect to learn no Spanish while playing Zumba Kinect, but you will learn the elasticity of your hips, mine was pretty bad

The fitness program involves basically Latin dancing on your own, salsa and mamboing all over the place. Walk past your own local community hall on a week night and you’ll likely see a packed room of ladies shaking their hips like crazy just as I did, it's an international epidemic right now. The exercise craze has had the fortuitous timing of reaching bubbling public popularity at the same time as the Kinect and a game tie in is a no brainer for all involved. Kinect Fitness is multiplatform and available also for the Wii and Playstation Move, but the Kinect is the best fit technology for the workout.

At this point I should mention that I cannot dance, even a little. I am immune to even Zumba’s promised ‘contagious rhythms’ and instead move to a tune heard only by myself and the tormented inmates of a Siberian insane asylum. All my joints are completely autonomous of my desires for them. So of course receiving my review copy filled me with incredible fear.

The game doesn't want you to sit down, ever

I can credit Kinect Zumba for revealing a secret about my wife of ten years. In her teens she was a Latin dance champion in her native Scotland (so, admittedly slim competition there), and has medals for salsa and maraca dancing. Naturally with her experience in the field I was more than happy to recline on the couch, eat ice cream, take notes and watch her Kinect-ercise with Zumba.

The best thing I can say about Kinect Zumba is that it is not as bad as the expected shovelware. Production values are decent and effort has gone into ensuring the experience provides the workout offered on the box. The tutorials are essential but not as comprehensive as they need to be. The dances that are part of the Zumba workout are pretty damn complicated and the tutorials don’t offer a lot of feedback as to whether or not you’re actually doing them well.

Jumping straight into the game is an exercise in chronic embarrassment, you just can't follow the workout without a rough idea of what they're going to involve before hand. In fact if you're a complete novice it's in your best interest to spend a week, no kidding, an entire week, just going through the tutorials over and over again. Don't worry about a workout, you'll fill buckets with sweat just running through the tutorial, this was news to me but dancing gets your heart rate up and works out the muscles a lot faster than running. Even after a week when you first try the game proper you'll misstep and flap around a fair bit. The feedback you get from the instructor isn't great, as opposed to Dance Central when it's obvious what move you've actually failed Zumba tracks your outline and matches it to the instructor with the colour changing as you do better at the moves and the background begins to flash and pulse as you improve.

At the end of the day the hot pants wearing elephant in the room is Dance Central, the as yet unrivalled dance Kinect game from Harmonix. While Kinect looks above average and certainly provides a good, sweaty workout the quality and entertainment value of Dance Central is miles above it. But still, for a third party brand title for the Kinect, Zumba is pretty okay. The learning curve is very steep and few casual players will have the mind numbing gamer persistence to reach the expert levels, but the people to whom the brand recognition appeals will get a more than decent workout out of Zumba Kinect.