The first Kinect Sports, developed by Rare, came out as a launch title for Xbox 360’s Kinect in 2010. Two years later, it was followed by Kinect Sports: Season 2. Kinect Sports Rivals was actually supposed to come out last November to coincide with the debut of Xbox One, but the game was temporarily postponed shortly before release. Now it’s finally on shelves, and you can prepare to sweat in your living room once more. This review should let you know if this little next-gen console workout is worth it or not.
So who is that, and where is the storyline?
Before letting you prove your skills at the six sports featured in the game (Wake Racing, Climbing, Target Shooting, Soccer, Bowling, and Tennis), Rare wants to convince you of the new Kinect for Xbox One’s capabilities. To this effect, the game gives you the opportunity to create your own champion by scanning yourself via Kinect – it even goes to far as to notice whether you wear glasses or not. The idea sounds really interesting and innovative overall, but unfortunately the result is not all that satisfying. In my case, my alter ego ended up looking like me only by a stretch of the imagination, which probably had a lot to do with the fact that it only rarely recognizes hairstyles and eye color correctly. If you still want to get your counterpart to match you more closely, you can manually adjust the settings in individual categories such as hairstyle, figure, hair and eye color, eyelashes, and skin color.
After you’re done creating your character, the Kinect Sports Rivals story begins. At least if that’s what you want to call six sports strung together by pseudo-story about a coach, a.k.a. a wisecracking wannabe. In the meantime Rare tries to use a sort of clan war between rival bands to add more depth to the game, but it ends up coming off as not much more than a cliché. The Eagle Legion, the Wolf Clan, and the Viper Network all compete for your attention and want to have you on their teams. Before that, though, you have to prove you’re good enough to play for them, and after countless matches you face the agonizing decision of choosing your team.
However, it’s completely unnecessary to give a pro and con list for each individual group, as this choice doesn’t really have any bearing on the rest of the game. After you decide for one team or another you get different clothing and items to match your teammates. So really you just choose the ones who you liked most in the little cut scene clips, who made you laugh, or who have the coolest uniforms.
Let the games begin!
As I mentioned above, Kinect Sport Rivals features six different sports, and you’ll already be familiar with soccer, bowling, and tennis from the other games in the series. New challenges introduced in this game include wake racing, climbing, and target shooting. Each of these let you use certain power-ups that give you particular advantages like increased speed or accuracy, or somehow hurt your opponents. You get these by impressing the fans with your cool moves.
Training starts with a round of Wake Racing, which you might recognize from the demo. To accelerate, make a fist, and to slow down, open your hand back up. You steer by pulling back your right or left arm, depending on which direction you want to turn. There are also occasional jumps where you’ll be able to perform tricks that will earn you extra points. These races are a lot of fun, but the courses are way too similar, and the lack of diversity is really noticeable.
Once you’ve gotten through the ridiculously long load time, which will not be the last, the next activity starts: Climbing, or “dammit!” as you might affectionately call it. While clambering horizontally is easy enough and makes sense, the game kept misinterpreting my movements whenever I tried any lateral hand-over-hand movements, which cost me valuable time and really got on my nerves. The game also often failed to recognize jumps or would make a completely wrong move when climbing vertically – for example I might try to reach left, but my avatar would climb downwards. At higher difficulty levels there are obstacles and other natural phenomena to overcome, such as gusts of wind that can blow you off the rock wall if you get caught up in them. But if there are going to be dangers like this, then it would be really nice if the Kinect actually interpreted things correctly. If one of your opponents passes you by, you can yank him or her off the wall, and of course they can knock you off course as well.
The next sport is target shooting, which is more like a mini-game than any kind of actual athletic challenge. It consists of not much more than holding out a finger and moving a crosshairs over the targets. Since the game is not all that challenging, they tried to add a bit of variety by offering a diverse range of targets. There are targets with numbers that have to be shot down in order, and targets with skulls that will take points away from you if you hit them. It’s pretty fun, but it gets boring quickly, though it’s good as a short party game or something.
Soccer and other disasters
After a relaxing session of target shooting, Rare invites you to play the worst soccer game ever. In the course of the match, you’ll find yourself getting really frustrated again, as even though this segment of the game seems like it has a lot to offer, the Kinect’s motion recognition fouls things up big time. As the soccer game begins, you start off as an offensive player and pass from one stationary blue player to another, and it’s right here where the Kinect tackles you hard – no matter how hard you try to aim the ball in a certain direction, it gets passed to a random teammate. It doesn’t matter if this player is being covered by one of the opposing red figures moving back and forth, which means the ball gets intercepted and your stint on offense is over.
Then you change sides, and you’re playing defense. At first you just look on as your opponent comfortably passes the ball back and forth, and of course none of your defenders take the ball from them. In front of the goal you can see where the ball’s going to go, and all you have to do is stand there and use your fist or your leg to keep it out. Then you’re on offense again, and you have to try to get through to the goal and make it in. Nothing is asked of you but whether you want to hit the ball in with your head or use your foot to shoot, but here as well, the Kinect doesn’t allow you to choose what direction the ball will go in.
Now we come to the second-to-last sport, Bowling. This is yet another one of those games that really sound interesting on paper, but fall flat because they are so poorly implemented. Before you release the ball, you can choose more or less where you want it to go by stepping from side to side to and selecting an arrow. At least in theory, because in practice, when I would select an arrow all the way to the left, the ball would land right in the middle of the lane. So it’s no surprise that I almost always ended up missing the pins on the outside. It would have been nice here if they had some sort of way to “lock” the arrow you choose, because sometimes when you actually go through with the bowling motion, you unwittingly select an adjacent arrow.
After this mess, those of you who are not completely frustrated yet can have a go at tennis. The gameplay here is simple – all you have to do is move your arm at the right moment to hit the ball. You’ll most probably have a hard time getting the timing right at first, but after a few matches, you’ll have it down. The annoying this is that once again, the idea sounds really good and the action-packed gameplay is impressive, but the Kinect’s poor recognition is frustrating. It didn’t matter how I hit the ball, I could not discern any reasonable system at work, and got the feeling that it was all just random. One thing all the different sports have in common is that you can select various difficulty levels, so that beginners and veteran players alike will be able to find the right challenge for them, and the motivation to try to do more.
Shopaholics in power
Well that’s it for the different sports themselves, but what’s going to make you keep playing? For this, there’s Rare’s built-in leveling and monetary system. Each match will get you more fans and experience points, which you can use to climb the ranks in that sport and unlock clothing and items. You can then buy these items in the shop, but you have to buy clothing for each sport separately. I just can’t understand why you have to unlock a separate uniform for each sport and then pay 5000 coins for each one. For specific items that give you power-ups for a particular sport, it might make sense, but for clothing that all looks the same anyway and which doesn’t offer any advantages, it’s completely pointless.
Multiplayer, or the art of group frustration
If you don’t feel like facing the game alone, you can also compete against other players on Xbox LIVE or on a single console. Just make sure that if you’re playing on one Xbox One, you have enough room, otherwise the Kinect will have problems distinguishing between the limbs of individual players. If you don’t have enough room, you can always play bowling, as players play one after another in that game.
Because having enough room is such an issue, a lot of people will most likely choose to play on Xbox LIVE. You should realize though that these are not really head-to-head duels against other players, but similar to the system used in Forza Motorsport 5, you actually play against their avatars, whose abilities are determined by how well they’ve done in each sport in their own game. One advantage of this, of course, is that nobody’s going to cut the game short because they’re upset about losing. It also allows you to pause the game briefly to answer the door or something without having to deal with any spiteful messages when you get back. The disadvantage, of course, is that you won’t be able to compete against your opponent directly.
Pretty visuals and nice music
The graphics in Kinect Sports Rivals are cartoony rather than realistic, and that’s precisely what gives the game its charm. The only question is whether they planned it that way from the beginning or just did it because it would be easier to implement. Just imagine what Kinect Sports Rivals would be like with the level of detail and realism in Ryse: Son of Rome, Tomb Raider, or Thief. That would have be another step in the direction of alternative sports.
The use of light and garish colors gives the game a pleasant feel. Especially with Wake Racing, they really used the game’s full graphics potential, going so far as to animate water splashing on the camera. By and large, the game plays with colors a lot and offers a ton of pyrotechnic effects and cheerful animation. Built-in fans surrounding the playing area cheer you on, and even show more dedication as you get better.
The soundtrack of Kinect Sports Rivals is full of licensed pop songs like “Wake Me Up” by Avicii, “Let’s Go” by Calvin Harris, and “Collide” by Youngblood Hawke, which make for the perfect background to the game’s athletic activities. And the great amount of variety ensured that it never gets annoying or boring, either. The only thing that messed up the good impression that the game’s sound otherwise made was the noticeably asynchronous match-up between recorded voices and character animations.
Official Trailer
