Just Dance 4 Solid Xbox Fitness Game Despite a few glitches, Just Dance 4 is an excellent dance game that focuses more on fun and frivolity vs. the more serious and technical Dance Central 3. Its fun and its motivational features are excellent for getting you to return over and over to get a great workout. Rating by steve: 4.5 stars I’ve previously written reviews of Just Dance 4 for [ Read More ]
Rapala for Kinect Weird fishing game that’s actually kind of fun once you get past the weirdness Rapala for Kinect is the latest in a series of fishing simulation games by Activision. The Kinect version adds full motion gestures for casting, hooking, and reeling in fish. Some parts are surprisingly realistic, while other parts are obviously there to make the game accessible to kids. And surprisingly, you can get a [ Read More ]
Dance Central 3 Continues to push the Dance Central franchise forward. Dance Central 3 continues in the tradition of its two predecessors in providing a dance game that is not only fun to play, but will also provide one of the best video game workouts you can get, while also teaching you authentic and legitimate dance moves that you can show off on any dance floor. Rating by steve: 5.0 [ Read More ]
NBA Baller Beats What a Kinect game should be NBA Baller Beats is much like other rhythm games like Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution, but with a twist. Instead of strumming a fake guitar or moving your feet, you’re dribbling and doing real moves with a real basketball. And it works, both as a really fun experience and as a great fitness game. Rating by steve: 5.0 stars [ Read More ]
Zumba Fitness Core Another excellent entry into the Zumba Fitness series After a shaky start with the first Zumba game in 2010, Majesco greatly improved the franchise with Zumba Fitness Rush and now improves it even more with Zumba Fitness Core, adding new songs, new moves, new instructors, and robust online capabilities. Rating by steve: 4.5 stars When Majesco released Zumba Fitness for the Kinect in 2010, by most accounts [ Read More ]
Harley Pasternak Hollywood Workout Run of the mill fitness game that may be appealing to fans of Harley and his clients. Harley Pasternak Hollywood Workout doesn’t really add anything especially innovative to the genre of exergaming, but it’s still a worthwhile purchase if you happen to follow Harley Pasternak’s diet program or want to experience what it’s like to have the same personal trainer to the hottest Hollywood stars. Rating [ Read More ]
Adidas MiCoach for Kinect Excellent Kinect workout game for aspiring athletes If I had to summarize Adidas miCoach for Kinect in one word, it’d be “ambitious”. While other fitness titles aspire to simulate the gym instructor down the road, MiCoach aspires to simulate a professional-caliber strength and conditioning coach. And it pulls it off. Rating by steve: 4.5 stars There are a couple of options in Adidas miCoach for [ Read More ]
Let’s Dance for Kinect Won’t dethrone the leaders anytime soon, but still a solid dance game with some nice innovations Let’s Dance is a dance game developed by Lightning Fish games which is innovative in its use of your real video image instead of a cartoon avatar. While the game is not without its faults, and is certainly not going to de-throne Dance Central for accuracy nor Just Dance 3 [ Read More ]
Country Dance All Stars Dance Central for Country Music Country Dance All Stars doesn’t really try to hide what it is, which is Dance Central with country music. If you’re a country music fan, you’ll definitely love the music and you’ll most likely love the moves which are drawn more from the country music world than the pop or hip-hop world as previous games (even with country music) have been. [ Read More ]
Junk Fu Sometimes the best Xbox Fitness games don’t have to be the most expensive ones. Junk Fu is a surprisingly good workout game that is fun, addictive, can provide a great workout, and at 240 Microsoft points costs less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Rating by steve: 4.0 stars It’s funny, but for months now I’ve been reviewing $50-60 Kinect games, hoping to find one that [ Read More ]
Rhythm Party Captures the spirit of the original DDR Konami has gone “back to basics” with this Xbox Marketplace downloadable game and has produced a fun, simple, and effective-as-a-workout dance game that goes back to its roots of pattern matching vs. real dance steps. Rating by steve: 4.0 stars Continuing our review of Xbox Marketplace games that make for great (and cheap) workouts, I’ve decided to review Rhythm Party by [ Read More ]
Star Wars Kinect The Force is Strong with This One Years of suffering through movie tie-in games have gotten me weary of the genre. I’m happy to say that Star Wars Kinect breaks the mold and delivers a game that, despite its flaws, moves the Kinect forward as an active gaming system. Rating by steve: 4.0 stars I’ll admit, after playing every movie tie-in game from Ghostbusters on the Apple [ Read More ]
Kinect Sports Basketball Challenge Add-On Basketball for Kinect Sports 2 A worthwhile add-on for users of Kinect Sports 2 which adds variety to the game but unfortunately carries over a lot of the sins of its parent., Rating by steve: 4.0 stars I’m admittedly not a fan in general of downloadable content (DLC). In theory, it’s great for a publisher to be able to improve a game piece by piece [ Read More ]
PowerUp Heroes Your Kinect Avatar Gets Super Powers A fighting game that can provide decent fun and exercise, but which ultimately seems to fall short of the Kinect’s potential to provide immersive, virtual reality gameplay. Rating by steve: 3.5 stars I’ve been meaning to do a review of PowerUP Heroes by Ubisoft since it was released in October 2011. It has four out of five stars on Amazon, all of [ Read More ]
Zumba Fitness Rush Majesco gets it right with this sequel to the original Zumba Fitness The original Zumba Fitness for Kinect was plagued with horrific tutorials and spotty motion controls. Happily, it’s all been fixed with this new version, called Zumba Fitness Rush. Highly recommended for Zumba fanatics and beginners alike. Rating by steve: 4.5 stars Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years (in which [ Read More ]
Let’s Cheer An excellent cheerleading simulation game for the Kinect Let’s Cheer for Kinect is another one of those games that many people will scoff at the idea of, but when you look beneath the surface you’ll find a surprisingly well designed game that really shows what the Kinect is capable of in terms of being a simulation and teaching tool. Rating by steve: 4.0 stars The target audience for [ Read More ]
Michael Phelps: Push the Limit A surprisingly good Kinect fitness game that’s both entertaining and a decent workout. Michael Phelps: Push the Limit takes the odd idea of having a swimming simulation video game and actually makes it work, resulting in a game that’s both fun and can provide a decent workout. Rating by steve: 4.0 stars I admit, like most of you probably are, I was really, really skeptical [ Read More ]
King Fu High Impact A groundbreaking fighting game that will set the standard of future Kinect Exercise games Kung Fu High Impact introduces something innovative to the world of video games: instead of using an avatar or a cartoon representation of you, YOU yourself are the actor in the video game. Your real-time video image is used as you kick, punch, and jump your way through a comic book world [ Read More ]
Jillian Michaels Fitness Adventure Jillian’s first entry into the world of Kinect gaming is a good game if your conditions are absolutely, absolutely perfect. But for those of us for whom it is not, it carries over too many issues from the ill-fated Wii versions. Fans of Jillian Michaels have been dreaming for years of a game where Jillian could truly act as your “virtual trainer”. That’s why over 600,000 [ Read More ]
Kinect Disneyland Adventures An amazingly authentic virtual Disneyland with spectacular attention to detail, marred only by some uninspired gameplay If you love Disneyland or Walt Disney World, you will feel right at home with Kinect Disneyland Adventures. The theme park is recreated with amazing details as an open world for you and your kids to explore and interact in. Graphics and attention to Disney detail are impressive, but the execution [ Read More ]
Self Defense Training Camp Solid content surrounded by a less-than-impressive game Self Defense Training Camp is less a video game and more an interactive training class. In it, you can learn practical techniques for 30 different scenarios. Unfortunately, great content is marred by being in a disappointing shell of a video game. Rating by steve: 3.0 stars I wouldn’t call Self-Defense Training Camp a “game” as much as I’d call [ Read More ]
Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012 Still the best “pure fitness” game you can get for the Xbox Kinect Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012 picks up where the original version left off. It contains a number of activities which are extremely fun, but also great workouts. It also includes traditional cardiovascular and strength-building workouts of the kind you’d find at the gym, as well as some interesting themed workouts. Rating by [ Read More ]
Grease Dance Not the One that You Want Grease Dance is 505 Games’ attempt to cash in on the success of dance games. While they scored a coup in being able to license the songs of the musical Grease, their implementation of motion tracking is sloppy. Recommended for die-hard fans of Grease, but everyone else can take a pass on this one. Rating by steve: 3.0 stars Grease Dance is [ Read More ]
Motion Explosion An unremarkable collection of mini-games destined for the bargain bin “Shovelware” comes to the Xbox. This is a collection of 12 mini-games which do a fairly good job of showing off the capabilities of the Kinect, but which are otherwise unremarkable. Rating by steve: 3 stars Motion Explosion is that it’s a compilation of 12 mini-games that have you balancing things, juggling things, grabbing things, and dodging things. [ Read More ]
Kinect Sports 2 Not a bad game in itself, but it could have been a lot more Kinect Sports showed off the capabilities of the Kinect. With Kinect Sports 2, it feels like the developers more or less phoned it in. While you can still have a lot of fun with the game, it falls well short of a game that really takes advantage of the full potential of the [ Read More ]