Goatmoose

Ahhh, Kinect Adventures.  The flagship title.  The Wii Sports of the Kinect peripheral.  It’s the game that everyone with a Kinect will have – by default the most popular title for the device.  What’s it like?  Let’s take a look…

I’ve already mentioned how well the Kinect performs on the whole.  Obviously, part of Kinect’s functionality depends on the game and its success in programming.  Titles like Game Party and Deca Sports Freedom have become famous launch titles for how poorly they respond to your movement.  Fortunately, Kinect Adventures doesn’t fall victim to that problem.  As one would hope for the game that comes bundled with the hardware and serves double purpose as a demonstration tool, Kinect Adventures works very well.

On its most basic level, Kinect Adventures is five mini-games in a greater package.  These mini-games can be played individually in Free Play mode, as an Adventure story with the games in a scrambled order in Adventure Mode, or in Time Attack mode.  The games are Rally Ball (a crazy dodgeball-ish game), River Rush (rafting), Space Pop (popping soap bubbles in a zero-gravity room), Reflex Ridge (a track-and-field inspired game on a rollercoaster-type track) and 20,000 Leaks (where you are stuck in a glass case underwater plugging leaks poked in the chamber by fish).  Each game has its own charms.

While playing, you are awarded bronze, silver, gold and platinum medals depending on your performance.  You are also awarded living statue trophies which you can bring to life with your own voice and movements, and your photo is taken three times per game by the Kinect camera and saved on your console.  Any of these recordings or photos can be uploaded to the internet and shared with your pals.

Of course, you can also play any of these games with a friend – either locally or over Xbox Live.

River Rush is my personal favorite.  Riding insane rapids through mountains, over huge jumps and even into the clouds never gets old.  The Kinect sensor works amazingly well with this game and every slight movement you make is registered.  The visuals are beautiful and it is easy to play this game continually for great lengths of time.  Or until you’re dead sore.

Rally Ball, in my opinion, can be the most challenging of the games.  That is, of course, a matter of perspective – as none of the games are all that hard.  But at least in my living room with my Kinect sensor, Rally Ball was the one with the most glitches in detecting my movement.  It can also be one of the fastest-paced games in Kinect Adventures, as opportunities to keep your eye on 8 balls at once are not uncommon.  The game is still quite fun and moves very quickly, well worth playing.

Space Pop is perhaps the least involved of the Kinect Adventures titles.  Bubbles appear and you touch them with any body part to pop them.  You move forward a step, backwards a step, flap your arms to go higher…. The movement isn’t very demanding and I’m not even sure it’s humanly possible to get less than a silver rating on a level if you’re bothering to try at all.  This game is admittedly somewhat lame.

20,000 Leaks is humorously fun in concept.  Watching a blowfish slam into the glass canister in which you’re held is enjoyable.  You plug leaks with your feet, hands, face, chest – whatever you can – and often end up in a vertical Twister position in order to cover them all.  The photos taken by the sensor during play can prove to be the funniest of all the Kinect Adventures games.  Leaks can be anywhere, and you have to contort to close them up.  Good, simple fun.  A very clever idea.

Reflex Ridge is by far the most tiring of the games.  In this game, jumping is key.  When you’re not jumping, you have to dart sideways quickly to avoid objects or duck low to not bang your head.  Add to that nearly continual arm movement to collect emblems as they pass you by and Reflex Ridge doesn’t give you too many moments’ rest.  It’s easy to get winded playing this one, especially if you’re in as *wonderful* shape as I am.  In my experience, it also required the most practice and form to get the timing right and not smash into everything you see.  Despite all that is going on, I find it somewhat boring and don’t look forward to playing it.

All together, Kinect Adventures is good fun with plenty of replay value on the games you enjoy.  It’s nice when a bundled game can make that claim, as it adds value to the overall product.  A good start, and one of many titles already available for Kinect that showcase the motion-sensing peripheral as an extraordinary new piece of next-gen technology.  Though it would have been nice to see more than five games in it, especially since a couple of them are not that interesting, I’m still a fan and gaga over the hardware.