[TheZeeMan]

EA Sports Active 2

• Official site www.easportsactive.com
• Developer: EA Vancouver
• Genre: Fitness
• Alternative game name: N/A
• Players: 2
• Xbox Live supported?: Yes
• Uses avatars?: No
• Age group: Teen - Adult
  

EA Sports Active 2 - The good

• I really like how it sets up the workout programs from warmup, active to cooldown
• Very nice variety of different things to excercise to
• Interesting to see your heart rate, is it necessary no, but it is cool
• Tutorials are very well explained and shown
  

EA Sports Active 2 - The not so good

• It takes awhile to setup your initial player from very detailed character customization to all of the setup instructions
• Price is $99.99 which like I stated, a heartbeat monitor which really isn't needed, but they make it mandatory, they also include batteries for the monitor and a very cheap resistance band. It almost forces you to get the better ones they sell separately.
• If you don't have adequate room and proper lighting, you are going to have some detection issues with the floor excercises
  

EA Sports Active 2 - Story
No story mode, but it does have 2 programs with additional programs to download. The 2 to start with are either a 3 week cardio program or a full blown 9 week program. It schedules what days to work out for you and you can adjust your workout schedule based on your real life schedule. Pretty cool to me

EA Sports Active 2 - Kinect experience
Kinect works very well with this game, except in my case, I didn't have a large enough play area and the lighting kept having issues when I was doing the floor excercises. Having the heart monitor on is awkward but I think it's because I'm used to no addons with kinect.

EA Sports Active 2 - Graphics
Graphics are good, nothing superb, but just like any other EA Sports game.

EA Sports Active 2 - Gameplay
It's not really a game, so there isn't much game elementals to it. You either do the excercises right or it doesn't let you progress. There are some non-regular excercise routines, I was only able to experience mountain biking which is interesting, dodgeball which is just like the volleyball dodging game in Kinect Sports, and a cardio boxing which was a tad buggy, but again, it was requiring me to crouch and jab and it kept missing the hit, so I'm going to blame my setup/lighting on that one. There was also a regular sprint race which was cool but not even close to being realistic, you can jog and it looks like you are running 50mph. This was what was part of my program, you can also select individual excercises as well, but I was pretty exhausted so I didn't do anything else.

Game Name - Multiplayer options
This is the only excercise game that allows simultaneous 2 player excercising together, however you have to purchase another heartbeat monitor and EA has not made them available yet.

Conclusion
It's a completely different experience from Your Shape. I really liked how you didn't do normal excercising routines such as lunges and squats, instead of doing regular lunges and squats, it throws in the resistance bands and you actually feel like you are working out, not just stretching your muscles.

The bad thing is, the resistance band they give is just a piece of green rubber, and you have to knot it yourself. It seems like its going to break very easily. I picked up the heavy duty resistance bands 3 pack which are way better. I would of given it an 8, but because they are at least packing in a cheap resistance band instead of nothing, they get one more point. To me using a resistance band is so much better than using nothing at all.

Screenshots
Not really a screenshot, but rather show you what you get.



More EA Sports Active 2.0
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