Kinect Sports is one the best selling Kinect games to date and a personal favourite of myself and the rest of the 123kinect team. That’s also why we were pretty excited to see that the second iteration of the game: Kinect Sports: Season two was playable at Gamescom. We immediately lined up to have a go at this sporty title and this is what we thought of it! (We didn’t take any video footage of this so this article is spiced up with footage from another game website)

Kinect Sports: Season Two

The demo of Kinect Sports: Season Two was prominently positioned in the center of the Microsoft Xbox Booth. It wasn’t placed in one of the closed-off demo rooms like most of the Kinect games there, but instead positioned on a raised platform with multiple screens installed so everyone could see the action. This is a clear indication that Microsoft is pretty proud of Kinect Sports: Season Two and really wants to show it off to the crowd. It did feel a bit weird to play the game admits a big crowd and have tons of people watching you while you play, but still, it was a good experience. The demo unfortunately didn’t have all the new sports available but instead only featured Tennis and Darts. We were hoping to play a bit of golf but I guess this will be showcased at a later stage. For now just Tennis and Darts and frankly, that was enough to get a good impression of this new Kinect Sports game.

Tennis

The first thing we played was Tennis: the mode that many of the fans of first Kinect Sports were begging for, and well, it has been implemented! When we started the game (versus mode, me against Raluca) it felt immediately familiar. The graphics are the same (maybe a little bit better), there is the voice of the familiar announcer and the crowd is as always cheering-on the player. The Tennis gameplay also feels very familiar. You start by throwing up the ball and serving and from there you battle it out using frantic forehands, backhands and smashes. But this is also where things got a bit too familiar for me, because although I saw tennis players and a tennis court on the screen it actually felt a lot like playing Kinect Sports One: Table Tennis. In fact, the moves are exactly the same! Even though a tennis court is way bigger than a table tennis table there is no change in gameplay! This is also because the characters on the screen move automatically (much like Wii Sports tennis), this could’ve been the thing that would set Tennis apart from Table Tennis, but I guess to keep it simple this was not implemented. This all doesn’t mean that Kinect Sports Tennis is not fun, it just means it is gameplay wise very similar to Table Tennis. I still had a blast while playing it and was exhausted afterwards from all the activity.

Darts

For all that played the darts mini-game in Carnival Games and found the experience, just like me, pretty horrible: You’ll be very happy to hear to Kinect Sports: Season Two works a lot better! In Carnival Games the tracking of your hand was a bit laggy, making it hard to properly aim, and to throw you had to make a massive hand movement, often making you shift your aim in the process and hitting somewhere completely different. This all fortunately does not apply to Kinect Sports: Season Two Darts: the aiming is super smooth and works like a charm. To actually throw the dart a tiny miniscule flick is enough, this means that your aim will not chance and makes this darting game a very pleasant experience. Other than that there is not much to say I guess, it works, it’s darts, it will be a lot of fun, period.

Conclusion

Kinect Sports: Season Two feels exactly like its predecessor and will probably be an equal big of a success. The two games I played worked very well and I was very impressed with the accuracy with Darts. Tennis maybe feels a bit too much like Table Tennis but is still fun to play. I can’t wait to play the other sports!