Tag Archive: Xbox One


Preview: Batman: Arkham Knight

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April 14, 2014

The Dark Knight returns

Everyone who knows me understands that I am one of the biggest Batman fans around. I spit out comic book storyline recaps like they were scripture and swear by all things The Dark Knight. So, when Warner Bros. announced Batman: Arkham Knight—and the return of Arkham Asylum and Arkham City developer Rocksteady to the franchise—my elation could hardly be contained.  My feelings of ecstasy only intensified, however, when I was finally allowed to see a half-hour of the game at GDC last week.

With bated bat-breath I watched as Rocksteady devs showed us what they’d been working on as their first project for the new generation of consoles (and PC). The Scarecrow threatens Gotham with a WMD that would flood the streets with a new, highly potent brand of his trademark fear toxin. After evacuating millions of people out of Gotham, all that remains is a skeleton police force, the criminals who want to take advantage of the mayhem, and the Batman.  But Batman isn’t alone in the shadows. In addition to Rogues Gallery mainstays like Two-Face, Penguin, and Riddler, a new villain, the Arkham Knight, emerges.

Although Rocksteady isn’t divulging too much info about the Arkham Knight himself just yet, we do know a couple of facts. First, he’s a brand new character, and he’s making his DC Universe debut in the game. We can see from pictures that he brandishes a large pistol and has taken on a motif similar to Batman’s (pointy ears, chest plate). His “anti-Batman” description also gives him an air that reminds me of the comic book villains Wrath and Prometheus. Whoever he is under that mask, we saw him get the drop on Batman during the demo, so I’m sure he’ll be quite the adversary over the course of the game.

After running through the basic plot points, we finally got to see Batman in action once again. New-gen tech has allowed for a bevy of upgrades and we got to see many of them in action. The biggest change is how Batman gets around. We finally get to drive the Batmobile. A major gameplay pillar this go around, the Batmobile is essential in helping Batman navigate a world that is 20 times larger than Arkham Asylum. But, as brand marketing producer Dax Ginn told us, the Batmobile isn’t the whole game.

“We wanted to be very confident and sure that we didn’t add the Batmobile and it suddenly just felt like a driving game or a driving bolt-on. That was something that was really, really important to us,” Ginn explains. “So, we’ve integrated Batman’s abilities and the Batmobile’s abilities, so that it very much feels like it’s a man and his machine, the integration between the two. You can eject out of the Batmobile to gain insane height, and that sort of augmentation of Batman’s gliding ability is the perfect example of how the Batmobile complements Batman’s features. There’s a lot more the Batmobile can do, but the way Batman gets into the Batmobile, gets out of the Batmobile—those things have really been designed to feel very natural and very organic.”

And from what he showed us, the Batmobile did seem to be more of a complement than the entire experience. In one segment, it launched the Caped Crusader into the night sky allowing Batman to effortlessly glide onto the roof of the building he needed to infiltrate. When Batman was ready to move onto his next objective across town, with a single button press, the Batmobile came roaring around a corner and Batman dropped into the driver’s seat, seamlessly, as Batman then raced off to his next destination. The player was in control the entire time. But between these segments there was still plenty of gliding, fighting, and case solving for the Dark Knight to do.

Also, it should be noted the Batmobile could be used for more than just catapults and driving around town. There are car-chase sequences where Batman can fire debilitating missiles to stop runaway criminals and even Riddler rooms dedicated solely to pushing the Batmobile—and your reflexes—to the limit.

“The role [Riddler] had in Arkham City, he’s more of an engineer. Very physical, constantly covered in a layer of grime, and so we wanted to think about what he would do next, where would he take the motivations he had in the previous game,” Dax says. “Integrating that with the Batmobile was an interesting design choice because he can achieve so much, even just as one guy, but it really comes down to the focus we put on the Batmobile. Driving through Gotham feels incredible, but there’s so much that it can do that the Riddler caves give us an opportunity to design puzzles that are specifically there to push the Batmobile to it’s limits, so we can really give gamers the opportunity to experience the Batmobile in all of its insane facets, not just driving incredibly quickly on the flat. You can drive up walls, drive on the ceilings, but that’s not so easy to do in the open world of the city. But the Riddler circuits can be anything, so that’s where it really starts to get fun and interesting.”

So, yes, the Batmobile can drive up walls. It is confirmed. I saw it do so, and it was amazing. But Batman’s car isn’t the only thing that’s tricked out in Arkham Knight. Gotham’s Guardian has a few new tools as well. In combat, Batman can now utilize the environment, like smashing a thug’s head through a car window, to get instant knockouts.  He can also finally use his gadgets while gliding to get even more of a drop on unsuspecting ne’er-do-wells. And speaking of gliding, the precision while doing so has been increased so Batman can even do 180-degree turns midflight.

Batman: Arkham Knight is looking great—but with only a small taste of the full game so far, I’m eager to see if Rocksteady’s plans indeed pan out. Still, if there’s anyone I trust to make a Batman game, it’s them, so I have faith they’ll be able to deliver on their promises of the best Arkham game yet. Knowing the care and detail that came off in this demo, it’s hard not to believe they’ll come through for Bat-fans everywhere in the end.

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EGM Review: Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare

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March 2, 2014

Sowing the seeds of fun

Whenever someone decides to do a spin-off—whether in movies, TV, or videogames—it’s a huge risk, since it’s rare to end up with a good one, and even rarer for it to actually be successful. So, when PopCap revealed that they had a small band of developers at the studio working on a title called Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, most of us were intrigued, but we worried if this tower-defense franchise could survive the sudden transition into the world of third-person shooters.

Taking elements from both Battlefield and Call of Duty, Garden Warfare mixes in some strategy gameplay and PopCap’s own brand of offbeat humor to create a wholly unique experience that’s wildly fun to play. Eight total classes (four plants, four zombies) playable across seven different modes provided me probably as much, if not more, enjoyment as I get from the shooters this game takes its inspiration from.

The element that grabbed me right from the get-go? Garden Warfare has the most interesting customizable classes I’ve seen in quite some time. Though you only start with four on each side, each class also has six unlockabale options that do more than just provide a new skin. This means there’s over 50 playable characters, each with their own degrees of originality. For example, the Peashooter has a Commando alternative that does less damage per shot but has a higher rate of fire.

Their use on the battlefield isn’t where this uniqueness ends, though, as each gradation is fully customizable. Garden Warfare offers hundreds of different items to unlock to give your plants and zombies their own distinct look and style. Whether it’s sunflowers with top hats, Chompers with zebra stripes, or All-Star Zombies with 3D glasses, there’s no reason everyone’s characters should look the same.

And, thankfully—for once—you don’t have to worry about microtransations when it comes to getting items. Instead, you unlock them via a free, in-game card system. You get cards from packs you buy with silver coins, the traditional Plants vs. Zombies currency. You can earn coins by completing matches and doing well, or you can perform certain challenges in a match (revive three allies, kill two Sunflowers with one shot, and so on). It may be a bit of a grind, but it won’t cost you anything extra on top of the money you’re already paying, a welcome change away from the policy of most EA games.

The combination and balance of characters is also intriguing and requires a lot more to master than you might expect. The Zombie Scientist is both the healer and shotgunner class for the zombies, while the Cactus is both the sniper and the explosives expert for the plants. Having a balanced team when you go into battle is critical and requires pinpoint communication between everyone on your team, especially in more tactics-driven modes like Gardens & Gravestones (think Capture the Point). A nice touch is being able to change classes mid-battle, in case strategies need to change on the fly.

Not everything about Garden Warfare is sunshine and rainbows, however. Even though the game has the lowered price tag of $40 ($30 on Xbox 360) to make up for the absence of any single-player, I still found it lacking the content you’d expect from a multiplayer-exclusive experience at launch. While the game lists seven modes, there’s really only Garden Warfare’s take on three: Team Deathmatch, Capture the Point, and Horde Mode.

Team Deathmatch serves as the basis for three modes by itself with Team Vanquish (straight-up Team Deathmatch), Classic Team Vanquish (any customization features are wiped away), and Welcome Mat (beginner’s mode). Capture the Point is seen in Gardens & Gravestones, which also has a Classic variant. In Gardens & Gravestones, the zombies must try to capture six to seven different points in succession. If the plants stop the zombies just once, the match ends. Finally, there’s Garden Ops—which, obviously, is Call of Duty’s Spec Ops, which originally was their take on Horde Mode. This is the only mode to feature a local and online option (exclusive to the Xbox One version) and sees up to four players taking on the role of plants and facing off against 10 waves of increasingly difficult zombies.

Besides the lack of modes, the game also has a paltry list of maps to fight on. Some modes only have one map, while others have a maximum of five (some of these being day/night variants of a map), and although it’s great to see them all done in the same bright and cheery art style of the main series, it gets repetitive when you’re cycling through the same areas again and again. At the very least, though, the maps fit the modes. Team Vanquish only supports smaller maps to up the encounter rates, while Gardens & Gravestones has large, expanded maps to allow for more strategic maneuvering when looking to capture points.

Now, don’t get me wrong—even though there’s not really a lot here, the game is still tremendously fun, especially when you’ve got a full room playing 12-on-12. The gameplay’s fast and frantic, and each mode brings nuance to the tried-and-true formulas. Garden Ops allows you to grow friendly plants that were all featured in Plants vs. Zombies 2 to provide extra defenses, while Gardens & Gravestones actually makes you feel like you’re accomplishing something when you capture different areas and push the front lines forward. I just wish there were more modes to try, and while content packs are coming down the line, I can’t judge what doesn’t yet exist.

Even though there’s a bit of a bare-bones quality, content-wise, to Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, it’s definitely one of the good spin-offs. No matter what genre they tackle, the developers at PopCap really care about this franchise, and they clearly put forth a great effort. From the deep class system to the solid controls to the tiny details like zombie-movie references in the graffiti scattered around the levels (my personal favorite was “You’ve got red on you” from Shaun of the Dead), there sure is a lot here to love.

Developer: PopCap Games • Publisher: EA • ESRB: E10+ – Everyone 10 and up • Release Date: 02.25.14
8.0

Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare is a polished, tremendously fun time even without all the options or content of its multiplayer contemporaries.
The Good A surprising amount of depth and customization in the character classes.
The Bad A lack of maps and modes at launch.
The Ugly Here’s hoping the port-a-potty with a zombie inside was clean before the Chomper swallowed it whole.
Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare is available on Xbox One, Xbox 360, and is coming to PC at a later date. Primary version reviewed was an Xbox One retail copy provided by EA.
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EGM Review: Halo: Spartan Assault

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January 16, 2014

An assault on the senses

When I first got my hands on a Windows Surface demo featuring Halo: Spartan Assault at E3 last year, I knew I’d never review the game unless it had a controller. Playing a twin-stick shooter without, ya know, twin sticks made the entire experience utterly frustrating, and I just couldn’t get past the idea of the inferior controls.

So, when I heard the game was coming to consoles and PC, I figured I could just wait for that version, since Spartan Assault’s largest, most obvious problem would be solved. Oh, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Even though the input issues have been addressed with a traditional controller, there’s so much more disappointment lurking beneath the Surface.

Spartan Assault’s single-player campaign passes itself off as a training simulation where up-and-coming Spartans can relive and learn from historic battles—fought by Halo 4’s Sarah Palmer and a new Spartan named Edward Davis—that took place on Draetheus V and its moon. The game also features a separate online co-op campaign in which you and a friend can take on the Flood. In regards to enemies, locations, and general aesthetics, Spartan Assault looks and sounds very much like a Halo game, just from a different camera angle.

Single-player is broken down into 30 missions across six chapters, offering an intriguing slice of Palmer’s backstory in bite-sized chunks that shouldn’t take more than three to five hours (six to eight if you also do the co-op adventure) to get through. Unfortunately, beyond the superficial details and the possible appeal of learning more about Palmer, there’s really little else here to draw longtime Halo fans in. And while the game’s length may sound short, Spartan Assault still finds a way to feel like a drag.

Now, I understand that twin-stick shooters aren’t really known for their depth of gameplay, but in trying to impart a stronger Halo feel, Spartan Assault also removes any and all charm that usually comes with this genre. Typically in such offerings, you eventually come across opposition that you can’t overcome through brute force alone. You need to strategize, even if it just means running behind cover and letting your shields recover. I never had this feeling in any of the game’s 30 missions. I ran in guns a-blazin’ every time and walked away. In a traditional Halo title, this might make you feel like a badass. In Spartan Assault, it made me feel bored.

The game does try to make things a little difficult by giving you limited ammo on all your weapons, something you don’t normally see in twin-stick shooters. In most games of this genre, you always have one weapon, even if it’s a weak little pistol that has infinite ammo for the sake of aiming, since it’s not inherently the easiest thing with the three-quarters top-down view here. By not providing any traditional aim assists with a laser pointer or an infinite-ammo weapon, the developers want you to be careful about wasting ammo, since aiming remains an iffy prospect.

This point becomes moot, however, due to the fact that many of the weapons are overpowered, and there’s so much ammo littered about the battlefield that I couldn’t imagine ever running out. And the fact the game tries to create difficulty through the genre’s natural limitations—and does nothing to hide this—just comes across as lazy design.

But the frustration doesn’t stop there. You earn XP as you play to unlock weapons. But instead of fully unlocking the weapons, you’re only renting them for that particular task, meaning you have to buy the best weapons again and again and again.

Or, if you’re rich, you can spend real-world cash to rent the guns for each of the game’s 30 missions—because it’s not enough that Spartan Assault for consoles ($15) costs twice as much as its Surface and Windows Phone ($6.99) siblings. Even though you really don’t need to buy any of the weapons to beat the game, you can’t help but feel like you’re missing something without trying them all at least once. The game wants to charge you even further to have the best experience possible.

And therein lies the true issue with Halo: Spartan Assault. It’s still just a mobile game using the same tired nickel-and-dime tactics to squeeze a few more dollars out of you. It’s just been cheaply ported over so that you can use a controller—which, at least, does work much better than the touchscreen inputs ever did. Sarah Palmer’s story, as much as I like the character, isn’t enough to make this anywhere near a worthwhile purchase. The developers couldn’t even tack on local co-op, which I would’ve enjoyed when taking on the Flood (in what proved to be a slightly more interesting experience than the single player campaign, if only because I was playing with a friend).

Players won’t be missing anything by mercifically passing on this one–Halo: Spartan Assault is easily the worst experience to ever feature one of the most famous names in gaming.

Developer: 343 Industries/Vanguard Entertainment • Publisher: Microsoft Studios • ESRB: T – Teen • Release Date: 12.23.13
3.5
A cheap port of a mobile game with glaring flaws at its very core that does a disservice to the Halo brand, Spartan Assault should be avoided like the Flood.
The Good Provides a bit more backstory to Spartan Sarah Palmer.
The Bad One of the worst twin-stick shooters I’ve ever played.
The Ugly The item rental/microtransaction system.
Halo: Spartan Assault is available on Xbox One, Xbox 360, and Windows 8-enabled devices (Windows Phone, SmartGlass). Primary version reviewed was for Xbox One.
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Alexander Gustafsson to Join Jon Jones on EA Sports UFC Cover

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December 23, 2013

Swedish MMA fighter Alexander Gustafsson will be paired with New York’s Jon Jones as co-cover athlete for EA Sports UFC, publisher EA Sports announced.

While it had already been set in stone that Jon “Bones” Jones would be one of the cover athletes for EA Sports UFC, to maintain what has become tradition for EA Sports games, a tournament was held for the fans to determine what fighter would join Jones on the cover.

After 11 million votes were cast over a four-week period, Alexander “The Mauler” Gustafsson emerged from a field of 16 candidates as the winner. Gustafsson beat out longtime UFC Welterweight Champion Georges St-Pierre in the finals to claim the honor. This was due in large part to the huge amount of votes that came in from Gustafsson’s native Sweden and the rest of Europe.

What makes the cover fitting, though, is the history shared between Jones and Gustafsson. Jones narrowly beat Gustaffsson to retain his UFC Light Heavyweight Championship back in September at UFC 165, but the win did not come without controversy.

Gustaffsson cut Jones’ eye open in the first round of their bout and is the first man on record to take Jones down in the Octagon. Despite ringside doctors wanting to end the fight due to Jones’ cut, Jones implored them to let it continue. The fight went the full five rounds and narrowly, although unanimously, Jones edged out Gustafsson on the judges’ scorecards.

Experts believe the judges scored in favor of Jones because he landed a great deal more “significant strikes” over the course of the bout than Gustafsson. The title defense was Jones’ sixth, a record in the Light Heavyweight division of UFC. Many can see a rematch between the two happening sometime next year.

EA Sports UFC is due out spring 2014 for Xbox One and PS4.

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Rayman Legends Leaping to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 February 25, 2014

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Rayman Legends is coming to the PS4 and Xbox One on February 25, 2014, Ubisoft announced today.

Aside from claiming improved load times and improved visual fidelity, each version of the game will feature its own exclusive costumes and content.

The Xbox One version will include 10 exclusive challenges and feature a Splinter Cell–inspired Sam Fisher costume for Rayman and a costume based on Vaas from Far Cry 3 for both Rayman and Globox. The PS4 version will tout Assassin’s Creed–inspired threads for Rayman, cross-play with the PS Vita, and will utilize the DualShock 4’s touchpad for various in-game actions, including scratching off Lucky Tickets. Both Xbox One and PS4 versions will also feature a “Funky Ray” costume available for purchase with Uplay points.

If you can’t wait to get your hands on Rayman Legends, the game is already available for Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Wii U, and PS Vita. You can see what Andrew thought of three of those versions in his review.

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EGM Review: Fighter Within

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November 27, 2013

Sweep the leg? I can’t, Sensei. I’m using Kinect.

When I look at the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 hardware, there’s not the largely noticeable jump that defined previous generational transitions. One piece of tech that was supposed to help embody the little bit of change we did receive, however, was the new Kinect sensor. Whereas the original Kinect needed all your playing conditions to be just right in order to work (and even then, it failed at times), the next-gen model was supposed to alleviate many of these problems.

Space and lighting issues would be a thing of the past, and the sensor would pick up the slightest movements—right down to your tiniest finger twitch. While the voice-command recognition can be tested via the Xbox One’s menus, we wouldn’t be able to see the most needed improvements until we actually got a game specifically designed for the peripheral. Unfortunately, if Fighter Within was supposed to show off how far Microsoft’s Kinect technology has come, then new-gen motion controls might be in trouble.

Issues to which first-generation Kinect users have become accustomed—such as inaccurate motion tracking and input lag—are prevalent in Fighter Within. You can’t even navigate the game’s menus effectively, because the recognition is so piss poor. I’d often have to use my controller to move through the wretchedly clunky user interface, since my body movements and voice commands were completely ignored outside of fights.

Once you manage to get past the menus, you’ll find the game has two modes. The first of these is your standard arcade-type option. You pick one of the game’s 12 fighters and move up a ladder comprised of eight of the other fighters (there are no mirror matches).

The other is a story mode called Initiation that follows a street urchin named Matt through 21 fights that are supposed to tie his tale together. I wish I could tell you something more about Matt and his journey, but there aren’t any cutscenes until the very end, and the between-bout dialogue is so devoid of personality that I quickly stopped caring. Oh, Matt’s father was a drunk boxer! And his opponent’s mother a disgraced Olympian! I wasn’t sure if I should use the Kinect to help determine a winner in brutal one-on-one combat or ask my Xbox One to find them a good therapist.

Then, finally, you get into actual combat, and it’s here that any fleeting hopes for Fighter Within at least being a fun tech demo are thrown out the window. The game does offer an interesting variety of moves for a motion-control game: standard punches and kicks, picking up sticks to whack your opponent in the face, jumping off scenery in the level, and even special powers—and you’ll need to go through Initiation mode just to be slowly introduced to everything your fighter can do. Of course, even with the added tutorials, it can be a bit much to take it all in, and you’ll find yourself falling in love with just a handful of moves that are more than enough to work your way through the ranks.

Still, this is all contingent on the Kinect sensor actually picking up your movements. Straight punches and kicks aren’t a problem, but the more complex the maneuver, the less likely the game will accurately translate it onscreen. Often, my grab and throw attempts turned into straight punches, kicks turned into wasted special moves, and raising my arms above my head for one special turned into nothing but a high block. And if you move too quickly, the delay between your actions and what happens onscreen becomes more prevalent. There’s nothing more frustrating in Fighter Within than watching your character throw extra punches into a blocking opponent after you’ve stopped—and then being helpless as the computer takes advantage.

It might not be entirely fair to condemn the new Kinect, because after playing this game for several hours, I think Fighter Within just may be one of the most poorly designed motion-control games we’ve seen yet. Simply put, it’s a complete mess. It almost feels like this was a game meant for the motion-tracking technology of the original Kinect, but because nothing was in the pipeline for the Xbox One’s launch window to show off what its new sensor can do beyond dancing and workout games, the project was shuffled from one platform to the other. That’s still no excuse, however, for this being one of the worst launch games I’ve ever had to play, and it should be avoided at all costs.

Developer: Daoka • Publisher: Ubisoft • ESRB: T – Teen • Release Date: 11.22.13
2.5
Fighter Within was buried under the rest of the Xbox One launch lineup for a reason. This one-on-one fighter is a throwback to the problems of the first Kinect—and does nothing but sow seeds of doubt that the next-gen Kinect sensor is any different from its predecessor.
The Good Interesting array of moves, including arena interaction. 
The Bad Input lag can be pretty terrible; lack of overall movement recognition, navigating the menus.
The Ugly How winded I was after some of the fights.
Fighter Within is a Xbox One exclusive. 
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EGM Preview: Fable Legends

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September 5, 2013

The stuff legends are made of

Fable fans have waited three years for a proper return to Albion, and they’ll finally get a chance with Fable Legends, which I got to see firsthand on the Gamescom show floor.

Keep in mind, however, that what I saw simply scratched the surface. By the sounds of it, Legends is far from anywhere near complete. If I had to hazard a professional guess, a holiday 2014 release date would be optimistic at this point.

From what I was able to gather from the reveal—as well as a 10-minute demo further illustrating basic game mechanics—Legends will be a throwback to the era of the original Fable, where heroes were plentiful and it seemed that almost anyone could channel strength, skill, or will. Unlike heroes of the past games, however, players will choose from one of several pre-determined warriors who specialize in one of these three pillars of Fable combat. This is a drastic shift away from the customization for which Fable is known, and even if you’re able to create your characters, limiting their abilities might make longtime fans wary.

The major reason for shifting away from one-size-fits-all characters? Legends is designed around four-player co-op. Either with three friends, three AI characters, or a mix of the two, players will always be traveling with a pack of heroes in order to quell the coming threats to Albion.

Whether these quests will be individual adventures or be part of an overarching story is yet to be seen, but I think the latter’s less likely. A level-summary screen popped up at certain points in the demo, which seems to indicate that each specific quest will stand on its own. This would also fit the idea of players taking on a collection of legends from Albion’s past instead of going on a new adventure with semi-fleshed-out characters.

Not everything will be foreign to returning players in Legends, though. The game will still feature a central town that will host the same manner of minigames that have become staples of Fable, such as blacksmithing or chicken-kicking. It’s not clear yet whether this will serve as a hub world where you can recruit other heroes on your adventuring ways, almost like a MMO.

But it’s not all about being a hero—a unique gameplay twist in Legends is that players can now choose to be the villain. This core evildoer will look at the game from a RTS perspective and plant Hobbes, Balverines, and other manner of foes in the heroes’ way and will gain XP and gold depending on how well their defenses hamper the heroes’ progress.

As much as Fable Legends worries me in regards to story, gameplay, and every other key feature, I’ll admit that it does looks really nice on the Xbox One. The demo provided a level of detail on my favorite fantastical creatures like never before—and, if nothing else, Lionhead has shown that they can definitely tap into the power of Microsoft’s upcoming console. Since the game’s still more than likely at least another 18 months out, there’s plenty of time for Lionhead to work out the kinks. That’s the Microsoft way now, after all, isn’t it?

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Hands-On: Kinect Sports Rivals

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Rock-Climbing Ray and the Great Kinect Adventure

The first two Kinect Sports games helped pave the way for casual gamers on the first Kinect, and while it won’t be available at launch, Kinect Sports Rivals aims for a similar success when it releases in spring 2014. At Gamescom, I went hands-on with two of the six sports Rivals will feature and got a firsthand look at the new Kinect facial-recognition technology.

First, it was time to create an avatar. While the goofy, kiddie fare of the past has been mercifully scrapped here, the new avatars in Rivals are still meant to be somewhat unrealistic—in theory, they’re supposed to match enough of your actual features so that you feel like you’re truly in the game.

Before I took control of the demo myself, I watched several others go through the face-scanning process and saw some amazingly accurate scans courtesy of Kinect 2.0—and also some that got everyone laughing. A bald man whose avatar was graced with wavy, flowing locks was probably the most humorous…at least until I took the podium.

The system immediately had trouble with my face. Usually, it can sense when you’re wearing glasses and will ask you to take them off (they’ll add some generic, Drew Carey–style black frames later). My frames were too thin (the game must have a “hipster” setting that I didn’t trigger), so Kinect scanned my face as if my glasses were actually the areas around my eyes. This led to several other mistakes, and in the end, I wound up appearing as a bald black man instead of an Italian-American from Jersey.

Allegedly, the customization in the final game will be robust enough that you can go in and fix anything you want—or give yourself ridiculous features like a blue Mohawk—but those features weren’t in the demo. So, I changed my skin tone, gave myself some hair, and threw on a beard, since goatees weren’t in the game yet, either.

The six sports featured in Kinect Sports Rivals include returning games like Bowling, Soccer, and Tennis, along with newcomers Target Shooting, Rock Climbing, and Wake Race. I was able to try two of the newest offerings, Wake Race and Rock Climbing.

Wake Race will immediately remind gamers of the N64 era, since it’s a pretty blatant copy of that system’s Wave Race 64. You race watercraft around a course, and the person in the lead after three laps is the winner.

The controls are simple, and I was surprised to find that the Kinect sensor followed me perfectly. You reach out and grab imaginary handlebars to let the game know you’re ready to go, and you control the throttle simply by opening and closing your right hand. Yes, that’s right—Kinect perfectly recognized when I made a fist or had my had open.

You tilt left or right to steer and stomp your feet to use a speed boost, which you can earn by doing tricks off ramps. Speed boosts can also be triggered via voice commands, but due to the noise level at Gamescom, this option was disabled for the demo. You can also perform tricks simply by leaning forward and back while your character’s in the air.

Once the game actually launches and your friends start creating avatars, you can, in theory, populate your friends’ games with your avatar—and vice versa. This actually reminds me a bit of Forza 5’s Drivatars, since the better you play, the more challenging your avatar will be if your friends download you into their games—making the challenge personal, even when you’re not doing split-screen in the same room.

Next, I got to try out Rock Climbing. Again, this wasn’t a very strenuous activity—maybe Rare learned their lesson from the exhausting running in place during American Football in Kinect Sports 2. All I had to do was reach above my head with open hands, grab when near a handhold, and pull downward to lift up my in-game avatar.

If I felt adventurous, I could jump up to put some distance between me and my rivals—of course, this also risked falling to a previous checkpoint in the race. But that wasn’t the best part: I could even reach out and grab rivals who were ahead of me and throw them off the course. They could do the same to me, but this actually incorporated some strategy into the experience and made it less of a blind race.

Overall, the Kinect detection wasn’t as sharp in Rock Climbing as in Wave Race, and I fell several times when the system failed to register my closed hand. I also got thrown off by a competitor when Kinect didn’t sense that I’d moved. That actually gave me the chance to see how fun Rock Climbing could be, though—I ultimately returned the favor on my competitor later on the climb.

Like with most Kinect-oriented titles, this one’s going to boil down to how well Microsoft’s motion sensor performs. Still, Kinect Sports Rivals is shaping up to be a fine continuation of the casual gameplay of the first two games, especially if the developers smash the few bugs seen at Gamescom.

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