Kinect Sports (Xbox 360) > Reviews (13)

Microsoft boldly launches the Kinect without a casual sports title bundled-in, instead counting on Rare to deliver a game that will hopefully land in every Kinect owner’s library anyway. Can Kinect Sports really stand on its own, or is it simply relying on the solid precedent set by the similarly named, similarly themed, but very differently developed, Wii Sports?

The Story

The moment Rare “independently arrived” at the same avatar design Nintendo uses for its hugely successful Miis, it was a pretty safe bet we’d eventually see a variation of Wii Sports making its way to the Xbox 360. And when Microsoft unveiled Project Natal, the peripheral bringing motion controls to the console, it became a dead-cert lock.

Indeed, Kinect Sports is a Kinect launch-title and the three main questions now are whether the six included sports are any fun, whether they’re better than their Wii alternatives and whether they’re closer to their real life counterparts thanks to the much-advertised magic of the

Kinect.

The Gameplay

Before tackling each sport individually, let’s outline the traits shared by all of them.

Every one of them is quite fun to try out at least once, but they all have glaring flaws that inescapably become annoying, quickly. The Kinect provides enjoyable gimmicks but, even when it works perfectly, it’s still obvious that the games are based on questionable physics and very shallow gameplay, something that becomes harder and harder to disregard the more you play.

And getting the Kinect to work perfectly isn’t as easy as you might think: You need a lot of clear space between you and the screen and the recommended 8 ft. are quite hard to arrange for most people. Again, that pretty much means you, at the very least, need half a circle’s worth of clear space in front of your TV, with that circle having a radius of 8 ft. and centering on the Kinect. For games like Beach Volleyball, it’d be nice to have clear space above you as well, lest you start bringing down chandeliers as you motion jump serves.

Anyway, the idea behind calling a casual title’s gameplay “shallow” is not that complexer control mechanics and a multitude of options were expected of Kinect Sports or that they are ever really required to have fun, in any type of game. It’s just that, what little there is in there feels cheaply done, on account of how most every action you take feels like it could have used some fine-tuning and especially because there’s always the nasty feeling there’s something missing.

The only exception comes early on and doubles as the perfect example of how something doesn’t need to be complex to feel polished: When you boot up the game you get to Conduct the Crowd. Your avatar stands in the middle of a huge stadium and the crowd reacts when you move your hands. Point them up, they cheer frantically, start clapping, they clap with you. Point at the sky, fireworks start going off.

It’s as simple as it gets, but you get to have fun with it for a few minutes, without wishing for something extra; except, maybe, for Rare to have gotten the Kinect to track fingers, so your avatar wouldn’t always hold out an open palm and you could actually point to the crowd, but that’s a universal limitation of the hardware that developers will take a long while to overcome.

Lastly, before getting on the actual sports, and something that Rare should have definitely coded better, is the AI for your computer opponents. There’s always a huge difficulty spike between Amateur and Professional, with the first two of the four difficulty levels being ridiculously easy and the last two unexpectedly hard.

Football / 6-a-side

The initial fun factor in Kinect Football comes from kicking the air when your team has possession and seeing the ball travel in different trajectories and velocities depending on your motion. In defense, you get a short visual cue of the ball’s expected path, and try to position yourself in the correct position to block it.

The fun starts to dissipate when you start realizing how little control you actually have. The computer automatically switches you to the player nearest to the ball, which is fine, but it also decides for you whether you’ll be passing or shooting, forcing you to shoot from ridiculous angles while not allowing the occasional screamer should you happen to find acres of space in the middle of the park.

You can’t really dribble and you can’t tackle. Sometimes your AI teammates will fancy themselves little John Terry™s and will be slide tackling all over the place, needlessly conceding one penalty kick after the other. Other times, they will be totally apathetic about getting to the ball, allowing the opposition players to get there first and leaving them open for what feels like ages.

This is always the case for corners and other set-pieces, with the defenders resting dumbfounded and the attacker always getting a shot off. This at least allows you to go for a trick shot when you are in the attacking side, which should have been possible in regular play too anyway, but it’s hopelessly annoying when you are on the defensive, since you helplessly watch the opposition play and hope you react correctly as the goalkeeper when they finally get the shot in.

Situations like these highlight the unfair advantages the enemy AI gets. The computer can slot the ball exactly where it wants when attacking, and doesn’t have to contend with the Kinect lag when controlling the goalkeeper. Human players have to hope the Kinect translates their leg movement correctly when shooting and are expected to be psychic in order to make a difficult save as the goalkeeper: By the time you get the visual clue for any shot that isn’t within arm’s reach, that is, for any shot made in the last two difficulty levels, it’s already to late.

Even if you do guess correctly and get a hand in, chances are high you’ll deflect the ball to a corner and that starts a vicious circle that only ends with your team conceding a goal. This is where the Kinect controls pay off, since, if you were using a regular controller, you’d probably throw it to the screen in frustration.

Bowling

If you haven’t played Wii Bowling, you’ll probably like this one, as bowling translates superbly to motion-controlled gaming: you pretend to grab a bowling ball and throw it into the lane.

Your throwing motion’s length affects the ball’s spin and its quickness affects its speed. Fun & simple.

But if you have played Wii Bowling enough to get bored with it, which isn’t that difficult a task since it has been out for more than 4 years, then marginally better graphics and funny videos aren’t enough to make Kinect Bowling seem fresh.

Its biggest strength has to be how much more streamlined the whole process is when you don’t have to use a Wii Remote; for example, you don’t have to fiddle with the d-pad to line-up your shot and pick-up a tricky spare. At the same time, there is so much time wasted watching replays due to the lack of a cancel button. The Kinect definitely needs to start incorporating a quick skip gesture, something like snapping your fingers, saying “XBOX Skip” or yelling “Get on with it”.

Another disadvantage of not having any buttons, or even props, to use is that the Kinect has to guess at which point you want to actually release the ball. This often results to quite a different throw than the one you intended and, sometimes, your avatar will simply refuse to let go no matter what you do.

Still, Kinect Bowling is not only pretty fun, but also the Kinect Sports game closer to real life. Granted, that’s not saying much: In real life, the weight of the ball plays a huge part and, of course, it’s not quite as simple to put in that much spin. Still, Kinect Bowling can teach you the basics of the game and help you understand the ideal way to deal with splits.

You can say it feels like bowling, if you magically became as skilled as a top-notch bowler and that’s exactly what games of this type should be about! Video-games are, after all, escapism, so if you can, say, play tennis adequately in real life, a realistic tennis video-game should eventually make you feel like Roger Federer.

Track & Field

The best thing with the Track & Field events comes early on, when the opening scene pretty much establishes the stadium as the one from the 2004 Olympics. It’s all downhill from there though:

Running in place for 10 seconds for the Sprint isn’t that much fun to begin with, running even more and occasionally jumping for the Hurdles doesn’t make it much better. It also shines a huge spotlight on the whole lag issue the Kinect suffers from, since even if you start your run right on the pistol, your avatar will still commence late and noticeably behind the computer controlled participants.

The Long Jump is pretty okay as you try to figure out how much earlier you are supposed to jump in order for the game to register it at the last possible millisecond. However, there is the glaring omission that although you can interact with the crowd, you can’t motion them to clap rhythmically, like many athletes famously do and even though this option exists in the Conduct the Crowd mode.

You have too little to do for the Discus Throw, and the physics look especially shady, but at least the event works, unlike the Javelin Throw, where a lot of my friends had to restart countless times because the javelin would launch on its own during the run-up, and my best effort to date is still comically short.

This is the exception because, in general, it’s way too easy to set a World Record, so there is little incentive to go back; after all, unless your name is Yelena Isinbayeva, one World Record should probably be enough for one lifetime. The Javelin Throw sticks out like a sore thumb and is pretty much guaranteed to bum everyone out, single-handedly making the whole Track & Field section not recommended for party play.

Boxing

Boxing would have been a neat little game... if it worked correctly. You can attack your opponent high or low, using jabs & straights, hooks and uppercuts and you have two defensive positions, upper and lower. There is a nifty power-up system, where you basically charge up your punch each time you block an attack; but it’s a bit overpowered: you should lose your charge if an attack gets through your defences.

Anyway, the problem is that, as mentioned in my Dance Central review, the Kinect

has trouble seeing your hands when you move them in front of your body, so it mostly guesses whether you are defending or not and, as luck would have it, it often guesses incorrectly. Especially for lower blocks and even though you have to use an exaggerated gesture that, in a real boxing match, would get you slaughtered.

And even if the defending can sorta work under ideal circumstances against the computer, it doesn’t do a thing against a human opponent who just keeps on punching. This makes Kinect Boxing have the credibility of “_Rock’em Sock’em Robots_”, but this is incredibly hilarious in itself, since it makes Kinect Boxing the first controller-free game that can be described as a button masher.

Also, it’s here where the irritating inability to change the number of rounds, or the time & score limits in any Kinect Sports game, stands out the most. With only 3 rounds lasting 2 minutes each, it’s pretty much impossible to see a knock-out; you’ll only get TKOs. The knock-down minigame is cute, but too easy to recover from even if you just flail your arms around so, if you decide to play “realistically”, there won’t be enough time for 3 knock-downs in a single round and the game will always go to the judges.

Beach Volleyball

The worst thing about Kinect Beach Volleyball is that it comes so close to being a good game, but for every instance it shows potential, there are two where it fails spectacularly. It starts as early as the opening sequence, where your avatar uses the sand to check the wind.

This looks cool when professional players do it, but it’s actually pretty important too: weather conditions play a big part in real beach volleyball games... but not here, as there is no wind in Kinect Sports, ever.

The gameplay disappoints similarly, since there are animations for cuts and drop shots, but you can’t do them consistently; the Kinect seems to lose track of your arm when you move it too fast or if you jump to high - that is, when you move as if you were really spiking the ball - so you are forced to do a much tamer impression.

Even so, you’re never quite sure what type of shot you’ll be doing.

The only exception is when you try to jump serve, where you’ll invariably pull off a football type of shot, a low-drive reminiscent of Roberto Carlos, which is beyond ludicrous. Some silliness is a a good thing, and trick shots like headers and shoulder hits are perfectly okay, but this is straight “_What were they thinking?_” territory.

Despite all that, and even though the AI teammate sometimes inexplicably gifts the ball to the opposition, Kinect Beach Volleyball might be fun to play, but it is definitely dangerous. Not so much because of all the running and jumping around, but mostly because it promotes the wrong way to play.

Beach volleyball is all about positioning and legwork: flailing your arms to reach the ball is frowned upon and using just one arm to receive a serve would make a real coach cry; here, it’s the most effective way to defend. So, unlike Kinect Bowling, which is good fun and slightly educational, Kinect Beach Volleyball is slightly fun and a bad influence.

Table Tennis

Kinect Table Tennis does a good job bringing legwork back into the game. In similar motion-controlled games, such as Wii Tennis, the computer takes care of your avatar’s movement, but here, you have to move around yourself in order to move your avatar and play effectively.

It’s also great to see that, unlike the Table Tennis in Wii Sports Resort, this game isn’t flabbergasted when you switch-up forehands and backhands, even if the hit detection and physics can, once again, look quite suspect. Kinect Table Tennis does get inexplicably confused as well though, when your avatar has to move closer to the table, but you can learn to deal with it.

The real problem is they just didn’t go far enough with the concept: you should have been required to move around constantly in order to win and you should have been able to take riskier shots. As it stands, you can play reasonably while standing still and, although you can go for topspin and backspin, it’s virtually impossible to botch them and they’re relatively easy to deal with.

In general, Kinect Table Tennis makes it look too easy. You can hit the net or miss the table entirely if your timing is way off, which might give your opponent an opportunity to smash, but you should have been able to smash whenever you wanted and aim as close to the edge as possible, with your success depending on the shot you are receiving and your form. As it stands, rallies can last forever, and it gets pretty boring.

And when you can even pick up versions of Pong that feature momentum to prevent overly long, boring rallies, it really makes you wonder how much thought Rare put into these games.

The Minigames

At least Rare appears to have been aware of their half-hearted efforts in Kinect Sports and they’ve decided to release the first DLC pack free of charge by way of apology. It includes one extra mini-game for each sport, and they are slightly more imaginative than the original crop.

Yes, Kinect Sports also features minigames, that appear both stand-alone, as well as alongside bite-sized versions of the normal sports and in random order if you choose the Party Play mode.

A quick run-down of the original mini-game selection:

For Football, there’s Super Saver, which is pretty boring at first, but becomes better once the striker starts making you work from one side of the goal to the other; I wish there was an option to start from there. Target Kick is pretty much its counterpart mode, where you’ll have to beat the Goalkeeper and hit the targets to score points; it’s kinda fun that you need to totally disregard fair play in order to perform well, since the best method for a high score is to shoot while the Goalkeeper is still down from a previous save.

For Bowling, we have One Bowl Roll, which is a picking-up spares minigame. It’s ok, but I found the Wii Sports version called Spin Control and featuring tiny barriers much more fun. There is also Pin Rush, which is absolutely hilarious, if only because you can also pick-up and throw two bowling balls at a time in an effort to get as many strikes as possible within the time-limit.

In Beach Volleyball, we find

Body Ball which is a bit like 20 Thousand Leaks in Kinect Adventures, in that it’s not about ideally receiving the balls, but about positioning your body correctly and simply connecting with every ball thrown your way. On the flip-side, we get Bump Bash, where you have to avoid anything thrown at you; so, pretty much the opposite of what you’ll want to do in actual volleyball as well.

Incidentally, Bump Bash takes the crown as the worst coded game in Kinect Sports, alongside the Javelin Throw. Even when playing under the recommended specifications, there still doesn’t seem to be enough room to successfully avoid more than a few objects in a row.

For Table Tennis we have Rally Tally which exposes the slowness of the menus, because if you lose early, you’ll want to quickly restart but you simply cannot. We also get Paddle Panic which addresses the game’s pace by having balls coming at you at such speed you have to use two paddles to defend.

The minigames added with the Downloadable Content are:

Super Striker & Fruit Splatter, which mix hitting with dodging, Pinvaders, which is as much a variation of Space Invaders as Target Smash is a variation of Breakout, Rapid Runner which is just more running with a few fireworks thrown in & King of the Ring, which is the obligatory boxing mini-game Rare forgot to put in the disc originally.

True to form, most of the 16 minigames are forgettable. They’re okay to play and not too enervating to try when hunting for achievements, but not something that you’ll be returning too, or that you’ll be actively seeking out more of.

The only exception is Target Smash, which is actually pretty enjoyable. It features clever mechanics, so trying to maximize your score can get as addictive as your average decent videogame.

The Multiplayer

Kinect Sports offers simultaneous 2-way multiplayer for the Football, Beach Volleyball and Table Tennis main events, but for none of the minigames, unless you are willing to classify the Sprint and Hurdles as such.

The way the minigames actually find their way into the multiplayer, is via the Party Play mode.

Party Play is yet another mode that feels designed with minimal effort, with its sole reason for existing is for the Microsoft marketing team to be able to say you can play Kinect Sports with the whole family and as many players as you want. While this is technically true, it is also kinda like saying the original Sonic the Hedgehog is a multiplayer game, because you can pass the controller around each time you die.

You see, you can have as many friends as you can fit in your house and divide them into two teams. Then, you have the unenviable task of choosing who gets to represent each team in a particular event. If it was the computer that determined that at random, Kinect Sports might have been able to tout “_Multiplayer Support_” with a relatively straight face, but this is just one more obvious, lazy omission from the developers.

With the AI being extremely unsatisfying in games like

Football, it is indeed much more fun to play them competitively against your friends, so it makes sense that Rare would want to build on the multiplayer experience. But Party Play is less about substantiating the experience, and more about smoke & mirrors. It really raises more questions than it answers:

Why can’t we form 4 teams? They could have been paired off fairly simply using the existing 6-event formula, with each one participating in 3 events. Or they could have participated in all off them by taking turns, as it happens anyway even now in events like the Long Jump.

Why bother with a scoring system at all, when there are only two teams competing? First place awards 100 points, so second place could award 0 or 99 points and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. It’s basic math. Why can’t we tweak the minigame-pool, excluding broken and disliked games like the Javelin Throw? It’s basic videogame design!

Why isn’t there at least one minigame that can be played with two, or more, players cooperatively? The usual excuse here is the still primitive software behind the “magical” Kinect hardware, which finds it hard to track multiple players at the same time, but here’s a no-brainer that would work nevertheless: 4x400m Relay.

Instead of addressing those questions, Rare’s number one priority seemed to be to create a dazzling environment for Party Play, with lots of fanfare, fireworks and cute mascots, to take the player’s eyes away from the gameplay. While “play to your strengths” is a respected motto, this shouldn’t apply when you are designing a videogame and your biggest strength is the presentation, while your mortal weakness is the gameplay.

The Presentation

Kinect Sports is indeed generally okay presentation-wise. The avatars are adorable but, for this type of game and in this day and age, it is simply inexcusable that you can’t customize their outfits. You can switch between their regular get-up and a sport-specific outfit, but that outfit is chosen at random at the start of a game.

This is especially annoying for the Football game, where the outfits will change even when you hold a rematch. I have to wonder if no-one at Rare HQ noticed it’s disorienting to play as the blue team in one match and then against it for the next one, or if they just didn’t care.

Some of the stadiums are very impressive, especially the Beach Volleyball one which, stupendously, doesn’t have boundary lines. The menus are pretty but unintuitively designed; you are forced to sludge through them at a glacial pace. This is most noticeable when trying to do simple tasks, like changing the AI’s difficulty, and needing what seems like seven hours and a half to do so.

There are plenty of popular songs from various eras covering the replays which should, of course, have been easily skippable. These songs are probably what push the game to an otherwise inexplicable 12 and over rating, because there’s little doubt it’s not intended for more mature audiences than Kinect Adventures, which gets a 3 and over.

By the way, of all the times Rare didn’t give a damn in Kinect Sports, I find this the most baffling. I mean, okay, it restarts with a goal kick after a goal in the Football game, and the Commentator doesn’t know what he’s talking about during the Table Tennis matches and Rare doesn’t care enough to provide fixes. I get that: they’re lazy and are phoning this one in; these are also relatively trivial issues you can probably only find out about after you’ve bought the game, so it’s pretty safe to say they won’t impact sales.

But how can they not care about excluding potential buyers for no real reason whatsoever, just to have a couple some popular songs? Do they figure nobody takes notice of the ratings unless it’s 18+?

Anyway, let’s wrap this marathon review up by mentioning the recap reels at the end of a game. In what will undoubtedly be a thing with Kinect titles, they show footage from the camera taken while you were playing the game and they actually are a true highlight, especially for certain sports and when you first see them. You can even upload them to the Internets, access and download them.

OVERALL

To summarize, Kinect Sports is an okay game with horrendous lasting appeal that I can’t possibly recommend. It works best as a showcase, which is exactly why it should have been combined with Kinect Adventures and bundled with the hardware. Paying full price for a product this rushed and lazy is absurd.

One might argue that it’s just a casual game, and a launch title at that, so it can get away with phoning it in a little bit, but that’s simply not the case. A few years ago, we got Wii Sports which not only did a great job demonstrating what the Wii Remote is capable of, it also provided you with a few games that felt like quality and you’d actually want to keep playing: Wii Tennis, Bowling & Golf.

I guess that Kinect Sports shows that the Kinect can be used to emulate the Wii on the Xbox 360, but that’s pretty unimpressive even if you haven’t seen the amazing Kinect Hacks regular users have come up with. You can have fun with it for a short while and it’d be nice to boot-up each time new friends come over and until good games start showing up, but you might as well use Kinect Adventures in its place; it’s nothing special either, but it’s free and at least has a catchy tune.

Precise Score: 6/10