Review misses some pictures, but text is there. Please bare with us as we are currently in a migration process of all the reviews.

Motion Sports – The good

  • The graphics are nice
  • Different genre of mini-sports games
  • Seems there is a good variety of options to unlock
  • Seriously, that’s all I got MotionSports: Play for Real kinect game reviews

MotionSports – The not so good

  • Worst controls on Kinect so far
  • Without proper working controls, the game is not enjoyable

MotionSports – Kinect experience
I don’t think this game even went through QA and was just rushed to be a launch title. Kinect only recognizes majority of arm movements, not much else. It takes your pictures and videos as well, but not impressed about the technology utilization.

MotionSports – Graphics
The graphics are very nice. Current gen with everything in high detail.

MotionSports – Gameplay
Ok here’s the main problem with the game. The controls are very half assed. I don’t think Ubisoft spent as much time working on this game as they did with You Shape: Fitness Evolved. The game has its own in-game calibration setup, but it barely works. I’ll give a quick rundown of all the problems I experienced.

Horseback Riding – You have to move your arms in an up and down motion to gain speed, mimicing to raise and lower the reigns on a horse. I’ve done horseback riding before, and you don’t raise and lower on the reigns to increase speed, so it’s kind of contradicting. You also have to jump over the hurdles to make your horse jump, but it’s very delayed as in about 5 second delay, so it completely throws you off. It’s basically trying to drive a car with a steering wheel that moves up and down. Was not impressed didn’t even continue to unlock the other “modes” it had available.

Skiing – This was ok. I only did a downhill course, but you have ski poles and you have to push off, and use them to increase speed. It wasn’t too bad at all, I played it at least more than once.

Football – I’m not sure if this one was the worst or boxing, but they are pretty close. The game has your player running automatically, so you don’t have to run in place. I actually couldn’t get past the first drill to unlock the other drills, but the first drill requires you to jump and duck to the endzone. Well, jumping works but it’s also delayed, ducking doesn’t work at all. I was thinking it was kinect setup, so I recalibrated and even did fine tuning. Still wouldn’t detect I was ducking. Popped in Kinect Sports, amazing everything works perfect, so this is bad on Ubisoft’s part. Possibly they will fix this with a patch release.

Hang Gliding – This one worked pretty good but only because you are only using your arms. If you had to use your legs, forget about it. It’s very very sensitive which can get annoying at some times, if you move you arms up or down like 1 inch, it puts into a stall or a dive. Somehow I landed but I think it was more automated.

Boxing – This one is pretty bad. Your gloves disappear everytime you swing, so forget about combos. There is no skill involved either. You can just keep swinging and you have no gloves on screen, but somehow you knock your opponent down and you can’t tell when you hit him.

Soccer – Again, the controls are awful so I wasn’t able to pass the first drill. It’s the penalty shot. It is a very cool concept, but it doesn’t work. They make you walk closer to kinect, and bend over to put the ball on the ground as you would in real life. It took me about 4-5 tries to just get the ball on the ground. After its on the ground, they want you to walk backward, just as in real life, to set yourself up to kick. This is where you have tons of problems. You have to remember where the imaginary ball is on the ground and kick it. Now throw in the game not always detecting you to kick it, and yeah this took me about 10 tries per shot to get it working. It was just awful. You then switch to goalie, and this didn’t work well at all either. I was able to deflect once because the opponent kicked it higher up and was able to use my arms. It also automatically dives for you. Compared to Kinect Sports soccer, this one is just awful.

MotionSports – Multiplayer options
I didn’t attempt multiplayer but realistically, with the controls this bad for one person, I doubt it will work at all for two.

Conclusion
Thankfully, I did not purchase this game. I would of been very upset to waste $50 on this unfinished garbage. I rented it and if you want to check it out, I suggest you do the same.

Ubisoft is making too many games and I believe this one was on their bottom of their list.


This review is based on a retail copy of the Xbox 360 version of MotionSports: Play for Real
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