Fighters Uncaged

And so the onslaught of rubbish Kinect games continues! This is one of the signs of the Apocalypse, right?

I’m going to try and not waste much of your time with Fighters Uncaged. The only thing you really need to know is that it’s rubbish. Sure, a satisfying motion-based full-body fighting game might one day come along, but this is not it. Not by a long shot.

As a random fighter in an illegal tournament, you must fight a progression of increasingly difficult opponents in order to… I don’t know, do something. Help out your father, perhaps. Anyway, the premise is very simple: flail with your arms and legs to make your fighter do the same. Except when your fighter chooses to ignore you. Get used to that one.

Wanting to dive right in, I elected to skip the tutorial. Then I elected to skip it again. And again. Turns out the game is desperate to teach you how to punch with your left arm, punch with your right arm, swing a hook with your left arm, kick with your right leg, and so on — one painfully slow motion at a time. Pressing ‘skip’ simply takes you onto the next move, which really isn’t a good design choice.

Get through that, and you’ll face off in four bouts with your trainer. This is possibly the highlight of the game, partially because the trainer doesn’t fight back much. Due to this, you can actually concentrate on what moves you’re doing, and when your trainer inexplicably shouts, “Look out for my punch to your face!” or suchlike, you have time to dodge, or flail, or whatever.

Despite that, you will just end up breezing through these rounds with a mixture of arms and legs flailing in the air. Various popups and meters inform you of a depth that you just don’t care about and doesn’t seem to matter at all.

From there, it’s all downhill. You’ll quickly find that your fighter won’t respond to your movements half the time — always a problem when it’s a motion-based game. The graphics are anaemic, the sound terrible, the music awfully repetitive, the animations stiff, and the crap that emanates from every fighter’s mouth is… actually quite funny, really, in a terrible sort of way.

At some point, you’ll hone in on a rinse-and-repeat strategy of blocking a move, countering, and waiting for the next attack. Pretty soon, every fight devolves into this. At least for me, attempting to deviate merely resulted in unresponsive gameplay and the enemy winning.

Fighters Uncaged even makes you repeat these one-note fights, forcing you to acquire a certain number of points in each round in order to unlock everything. But be honest, are you really going to do that?

I can’t quite say that this is the worst Kinect launch game, but it’s right up (read: down) there. The fact that this is a full-priced, $110 game would laughable if it weren’t so depressing and infuriating. I get really, really mad thinking that unknowing people have wasted their money on such garbage. Ubisoft, this is not the only awful Kinect game you’ve released — get your act together, please.

"Poor controls and bad design decisions ruin an already average game."

3.0 Awful