Review: Kinect Adventures

Kinect Adventures is one of the pack-in titles that comes with the Xbox Kinect, and it does a great job showing off the capabilities of the Kinect as a tech demo, while still being fun to play.

Kinect Adventures is essentially a workout routine in the guise of a party game, but it's one that feels far more rewarding and enjoyable than a day at the gym.

There are five basic activities you can play, each of which have you moving in different ways, and require different amounts of exercise.  Each activity is unique and most have engaging visuals.  It's great to see that it takes advantage of the fact that it's a videogame by creating activities that couldn't really exist (or would be really expensive, in any case), instead of just recreating a bunch of sports.

For each level, you can get a bronze, silver, gold, or platinum medal depending on your performance, which gives the added bonus of making you want to exercise.

20,000 Leaks has you in a submergible glass case, where sharks, puffer fish, and crabs poke holes in the glass. Your task is to use your hands, feet, head, or waist to plug the holes.  Sometimes multiple holes connect with a crack, so you must plug them at the same time.  It's a simple game where the majority of movement comes in the form of stretching your legs or occasionally standing on one foot.  This is also a bit of back-and-forth movement.

Rally Ball is kind of like a POV Breakout, where you throw and bounce balls against a wall to break wooden boards and hit targets.  Hitting the targets send multiple balls at you.  You can hit balls harder to make them go faster.  This mostly involves side movement and stretching your arms out.  But unlike 20,000 leaks, this requires faster reflexes to make your mark.

I know it's an exercise game, but does this one have to take place in a high school gym?

Space Pop has you in a light gravity field, collecting bubbles that come out of the ceiling, floor, and walls.  You flap your arms gently for lift, then move side to side or forward and backward to collect the bubbles.

River Rush has you balancing on a raft as it makes its way down a river.  You must steer your raft to collect tokens, hit speed gates, and jump over obstacles.  This activity has you mostly stepping side to side and jumping.  This is where the real physical activity begins; the others are warmups.

Finally, Reflex Ridge puts your body to the test, with jumping, ducking, sliding side to side, stretching, and even rowing.  You are on a wooden cart on a track, and you must collect tokens, just like in River Rush.  However, foam obstacles come at you and you must avoid them, like one of those obstacle course game shows.  You can jump for extra speed, or, when levers pop up, you can grab them and pull yourself forward.  This activity requires the most physical skill.

Each of the activities contain 6 to 9 levels of increasing difficulty.  You can choose to try them all individually at your leisure, pick one activity and play all the levels, or participate in various Adventures, where you get a variety of predetermined levels and activities.

In Adventure mode, you can collect trophies and prizes to customize your on-screen character.

Speaking of which, Kinect Adventures uses the customizable Xbox character you create from the console menu, so you can have your customized character as soon as you sign in.

Kinect Adventures also supports two players, so you can compete with a friend.

Xbox-themed wallpaper for your house not included.

While Kinect Adventures is an extremely fun game and quite a workout in some stages (replace those jeans with sweatpants), there are a few flaws which can make the game frustrating.

The worst of the problems is that jumping tends to be delayed or doesn't work at all at times.  I've tried jumping many ways: high and low, feet tucked behind me or feet staying beneath, and I find that either the jump doesn't register or it delays just long enough that I miss my mark or hit an obstacle.  This is actually a bigger problem for me than most, because I play in a room with a low ceiling, which means if I'm not careful I hit my head on a fan.  This makes River Rush and Reflex Ridge particularly frustrating, which is a disappointment because they are the most fun to play.

Another problem comes in with the activities that require back-and-forth motion.  The Kinect registers a certain range and requires the player to be between 6 and 10 feet away.  Playing 20,000 Leaks and Space Pop can sometimes result in the Kinect losing you.

An almost identical problem occurs with side-to-side movement.  Though it happens less often, in 20,000 Leaks I sometimes slide too far to the left or right of the Kinect's range, even though I use the widest allowed calibration.

Speaking of calibration, make sure you calibrate and fine tune your Kinect often.  While the jumping is still a problem, it becomes less so every time I recalibrate the Kinect, which fine tunes its recognition of my body.  It might get annoying to calibrate every time you play, but it's well worth it to maintain the best experience.

One final problem is more a design flaw than a bug:  in Space Pop, sticking your arms out and throwing them down fast makes you shoot into the air, while slowly lowering them to your side makes you fall.  Getting the timing of this is difficult, and I often find myself flying when I mean to fall.

Even with those problems, Kinect Adventures does a great job introducing the Kinect to a new player.  The movements you must make are identical to what the character on screen needs.  You don't have to run in place to make the character run forward, for instance; forward movement is taken care of for you by a river or a track.

On top of that, it's incredibly fun and gives a much needed workout, from light to intense.  If you need to work on your calisthenics, you don't need a gym membership.  Kinect Adventures rewards you for your workout and lets you play at your own pace.

Oh, and one last funny bit of business:  it takes pictures of you as you play, so you can see just how ridiculous you look when you do the hokey-pokey.