Kinect Sports Rivals: Looks and sounds pretty but...

I really wanted to like Kinect Sports Rivals. Not just because I liked the first game and used to work at Rare, the developer, but because this could be the game to prove to people that the Kinect unit is a worthwhile piece of gaming hardware, not just an expensive ornament.

 

Kinect Sports Rivals

For: Xbox One

From: Rare, Microsoft

Three stars (out of five)

 

It all starts well, David Tennant - he of Dr Who fame - talks you through the process of creating your champion (the game's digital version of you) and after a couple of minutes you're presented with a reasonably accurate digital selfie and the game begins.

So we head off to a pretty little island where different sports are spread over various places; climbing in the mountains, wake racing in the bay ... you get the idea.

And if it sounds familiar, it is - Wii Sports anyone?

Still, if you're going to make an interactive sports game, you might as well copy the best.

The sports available are wake racing (jet skis), mountaineering, target shooting, soccer, bowling and tennis, and each is introduced by a painfully long tutorial from Coach, the island's drill instructor, following an equally long loading time.

The first two events, wake racing and mountaineering, are great and both have you swaying and jumping round in front of the TV waving your arms like a lunatic.

However, from that point on it all goes a bit pear-shaped.

It's not that the games are bad, it's just that the whole thing is let down by the hardware.

And when the Kinect isn't happy, the game suffers big time.

In a huge perfectly lit empty room, the Kinect may well function brilliantly, but when you're in an average-sized front room with furniture and limited space it tends to struggle a bit.

Even without the dog walking past.

I was told many times that it was too dark, I was too close, or it couldn't see my head or my feet - and my lounge is pretty big.

For a game that relies on accuracy, this is a massive frustration, and it's almost if the developers knew this and have deliberately dumbed down some of the games to prevent more issues; target shooting is just pointing at the screen, no trigger-pulling needed, and soccer is basically a hit-and-miss leg-swinging experiment.

Bowling and tennis are OK, but neither has the accurate feel of Nintendo's version.

As I said at the start, I really wanted this to be great, but it isn't.

In parts it's fun, but a lot of the time it's just frustrating.

It looks and sounds pretty but, unfortunately, that's just not enough.

- Simon Kemp