Kinect Sports Rivals Reviews
Until then, Kinect Sports Rivals will remain an interesting experiment that never manages to live up to the expectations linked to it.
However, I'm not convinced the purchase price of $59.99 lines up with what Kinect Sports Rivals has to offer. Of the six game modes, only bowling and wake riding stand out, and the other modes suffer from a lack of entertainment. For all the enhanced graphics and technology involved, the game isn't that much more impressive than Wii Sports was at release, and it doesn't feel worthy of a full-price sticker. It's fun to pick up and tool around with some of the modes, and between the gameplay and the avatar scanning, it showcases the Kinect's capabilities. It's just disappointing that the game doesn't have that much depth, and with few exceptions, its only successes are things that have already been done before with different technology.
The package as a whole is good enough to not be an embarrassment, but there are far too many times where the interface gets in the way of the entertainment that the generally passable gameplay provides.
Sprinting out of the starting blocks like Usain Bolt, Kinect Sports Rivals quickly pulls over short of the finish line and soils itself like Paula Radcliffe. Two of the six sports on offer here pack a real punch, with the others lagging way behind. A valiant effort, if not a lot more else. A genuine attempt at highly competitive sports are hampered by a needlessly convoluted interface.
Kinect Sports Rivals is solid enough to get players moving, and provides entertainment when competing against friends. As much as the game may try, however, the limitations of Kinect is its biggest rival.
Kinect Sports Rivals is a good game on the Xbox One but it's not the game that successfully turns Kinect into a true gaming medium. I'm sure this will come but for now, it is easily the best motion controlled game on any console and developers RARE have really thought outside the square in terms of translating these real world games onto the Xbox One console. Some games such as a soccer were a little too complicated, especially with the accuracy of the motion controls but other titles such as bowling and jet ski racing almost felt like the real thing.
As a pack-in for the console, this would have been far easier to forgive, but at full price and with no proper multiplayer, it's a tough sell. Rare's game looks stunning and is enjoyably tame, but lacks in true winner's grit and star quality. Maybe next season.
As someone who enjoyed the first two Kinect Sports games, but felt they were held back by the limits of the technology, I'm impressed by how good Kinect Sports Rivals turned out. The responsiveness is much closer to 1:1 now than it was then, and other than the issue with the screen being obscured, everything works quite well.
Dust off Kinect, do some stretches and get ready to compete. Kinect Sports Rivals makes you pleased to own the motion controller.
You can squeeze a little bit of fun out of Kinect Sports Rivals. Some of the games aren't so bad and it certainly stands as a great demo of what the new Kinect can do. You can also have the game render a rule 63 version of yourself and… shut up… I was just curious what female me looked like. You even get an achievement for it. So that's kind of neat. It's just that every game in the compilation is shallow when done in single-player and broken when done in multiplayer. Even though you may have fun with the games that actually work, there's little here to keep you coming back to play them again a second time.
[I]t doesn't seem to quite live up what we've been led to expect from the new Kinect sensor, resulting in a lot of frustration the ultimately gets in the way of the experience. It'll make a great rental for when you have friends over, but it's hard to recommend for anything beyond that.
".. the Kinect as a controller is impressive. I did my best to break the Kinect and it worked (at least partially) in every situation I came up with. "
If you can stomach the price tag and a few other issues, there are some minigames worth your time.
It's not that Kinect Sports Rivals is a terrible game, but it certainly doesn't utilize the Kinect in any new meaningful ways. After Microsoft's claims of improving the Kinect, I just wanted RARE to be a little more experimental with the tech, and sadly, that doesn't happen here.
KSR is better and deeper than most motion controlled games that I have played, especially of the family/sports compilation variety. However, it's still light on content and just doesn't have a great deal of staying power or replay value you would hope for.
It should go without saying that sports compilation games of this type are lightweight and disposable. But within that context, Kinect Sports Rivals does its job well. The motion sensing works, with a few exceptions, and the events are wrapped up in some beautiful presentation. Microsoft finally has a decent excuse for Xbox One's all-seeing eye.
Kinect Sports Rivals isn't the incredible demo that Microsoft's Kinect 2.0 peripheral needs in order to prove its worth, but it still exists as a relatively fun game.
Instead of making a case as to why you need a Kinect, Kinect Sports Rivals shows that the peripheral—and most games revolving around it—still have a long way to come.
Kinect Sport Rivals gave me a renewed faith for the Kinect. What Rare did was show us the technology works. Finally we've got a fun party game for the Xbox One that's easy to pick up if you have the space. It's not perfect but the title atones for past motion control sins. Most importantly, it gives us confidence for the hardware's future.
Rare kind of dropped the ball with Kinect Sports Rivals. It's not very fun to play, outside of jet ski racing, and the fact you have to wade through so much just to get to free play is tedious. Casual players probably won't mind trying out this Olympiad, but other players may want to stick to the more general – and less expensive – Xbox 360 collections.