Kinect Adventures Review

12 April 2011

kinect Adventures

The mini-game collection has had a second-wind since the industry went motion control crazy with the advent of the Wii in 2006. Now all developers’ ideas that were too thin to be stretched into a full game can be combined into a patchwork of partially-realised mechanics and ideas!

That’s not to say they’re all bad – I’m personally a fan of Bishi Bashi Special on the PlayStation – but for the most part they’re quick cash-ins attempting to capture the waggle zeitgeist.

Now Microsoft’s full body waggle-a-thon, the Kinect, has been released, the market is once again flooded with them. You don’t have to go far to find this one as it comes bundled with the depth-sensing camera.

Each radical new piece of hardware needs a proof of concept; the Wii had Wii Sports, the PlayStation Move had Sports Champion, the analogue stick had Super Mario 64. There has to be a title that shows off what the hardware can do to set an example for other developers and to impress those converted by marketing enough to justify their purchase.

Apparently Microsoft thinks Kinect Adventures it this title. It’s not.

Cheaply enough made to pack-in with the system, not only does Kinect Adventures not have what it takes to be a good game, it can’t even perform its job as a showpiece for the hardware well.

Health and safety regulations on the log flume had slipped

Despite early impressions, the final Kinect hardware is actually quite capable of tracking your body movements and converting them into a game without too much trouble – other titles such as Kinect Sports and Dance Central show this. But Kinect Adventures is one of the least-able of anything I’ve played on Kinect in actually tracking your movements. It slowly gets the broad strokes right but stumbles at the details.

Luckily most of the game’s five game types don’t require anything more of the player than the game is able to largely make sense of.

Unfortunately that means they’re almost entirely rubbish.

20,000 Leaks and Space Pop are EyeToy games. Not glorified EyeToy games, just EyeToy games that will leave you wondering why the Kinect costs £129.99 when it seems to do the same job as a seven-year-old webcam.

Rally Ball, Reflex Ridge and River Rush are functional but shallow and a chore to play. Rally Ball is the game first shown to demonstrate the Kinect and it’s definitely the most accurate of the bunch. Lift your left hand up to hit one of the incoming balls and it will probably replicate something similar on-screen. It plays like Breakout, only you’re a human paddle.

Reflex Ridge and River Rush are pretty much the same game, with minor differences – one has you freely control the movement of a raft down a river, jumping over obstacles and collecting pins, the other has you running on the spot in a mine-cart, dodging obstacles and collecting pins.

There’s simply nothing of substance in this game, nothing to keep you coming back or wanting to progress through its Adventure Mode, which links together the mini-games and challenges in a frustrating slow, drawn-out fashion.

The Kinect can work rather well, but this pack-in is a horrible, frustrating and disappointing example of it.

Verdict: 5/10