Kinect Sports Rivals is a disaster.

[Edward1]

I bought this game a few weeks ago and completely hate it. It feels like a game made by a marketing team, not actual game developers. The game starts out with about 2 hours of forced tutorials. You can't pick up and play this game. You have to go through a ton of tutorials before you can access "quickplay" mode (aka play what you want with your friends instead of stupid story "missions").  What makes these tutorials even more horrible, is that they have stories of competing teams who teach you. All the characters are terrible, insult you, and they are unskippable. Why?  Did they not realize why Wii Sports is one of the most popular games ever? Its pick up and play in its purest form. This game is far from pick up and play. Who asked for unskippable cutscenes in a motion controls sports game? I'm guessing that was a marketing guy's idea.

Also, the game has you create a character during these tutorials. It actually uses the Kinect to automatically create your character by using the camera. Mine was somewhat decent. It looked a little bit like me. However, you appear to not be able to play them in quick play (AKA against your friends instead of single player.)  Why? Instead, you play as a randomly selected precreated character. And as I said above, they are all losers.


Once you get to the sports, here are the reviews of each

Tennis - Pretty decent, but overly precise. I actually like the 360 version better.

Bowling - Boy did they mess this up. You can't hold your bowling ball like an actual bowling ball. Instead you hold your hand like a fist to bowl.... What? Stick with 360 version again.


Target shoot - This is somewhat mindless fun. You hold your hand like a gun and shoot targets. However, I cant find a level select, and it gets old quick.

Soccer - A disaster of the highest order. Completely uncontrollable. I wouldn't call the 360 version of Soccer good, but its runs miles around this garbage.

Rock Climbing - Somewhat fun. However, again you hold your hand as a fist to grab rocks which makes no sense

Jet Skiing - Probably the best sport in the game. Its a lot of fun, and this might be the framework for a decent complete game. It brings back some of the fun of WaveRace 64 (Not saying its anywhere as good).  However, again the terrible interface ruins it. I can't even figure out how to level select in quick play. Is there only 1 level? I honestly don't know.


So essentially, this game has a horrible interface. It focuses on a "story mode" (who asked for that?)  instead of living room based multiplayer that made the previous Kinect Sports games and Wii Sports so good. I couldn't figure out how to do even basic actions, and I couldn't just get to the games. I bought this game, because my wife loved the Kinect Sports games for the 360. She hated this. She's a casual gamer, and this game lost all its appeal to casual gamers.  I actually traded this game in, which is the first time I did this in years. I tend to like to keep games I buy, but I wanted to get rid of this abomination. I took advantage of a triple trade-in program Target is doing this week, so I got about a $45 Target card for it. I paid $48 for the game, so the best thing I can say about it is, is that I didn't waste too much money on it. Do not buy this game. Stay with the Kinect Sports games for the 360 or with Wii Sports. Both are 10 times better.  After seeing how much of a disaster this game was, its easy to see why Microsoft is trying to backtrack from the Kinect now.

[VideoGameCritic]

Edward - Thank you for taking the time to write this!  Very informative.

By the way, I heard the developer Rare was forced to lay off a lot of people because this game wasn't doing so well.

[Atarifever1]

[QUOTE=videogamecritic]Edward - Thank you for taking the time to write this!  Very informative.

By the way, I heard the developer Rare was forced to lay off a lot of people because this game wasn't doing so well.[/QUOTE]
There's also the fact that MS essentially made them a Kinect centric software house then removed Kinect from the most popular selling version of the One (that stat is from about 2 months from now if anyone is wondering). They likely had to lay off some people specifically brought in to develop for a dead peripheral.