14 DAY TRIAL // 
Does anyone really need the Kinect that’s been attached by Microsoft to the Xbox One home console? The launch of the new Kinect Sports Rivals, the title created by the development team at Rare, is the experience that was supposed to make the entire community answer “Yes.”
Unfortunately, the core experience created by the combination of the six activities and motion tracking is somewhat limited, even if interesting, and this never feels like the game to make the wider player community finally understand how important the tech is to the future of gaming.
There are moments when Kinect Sports Rivals is tons of fun and I especially liked the way rock climbing felt, even if its potential as a game is quickly exhausted, and the wave racing.
Unfortunately, the other four sports do not manage to do anything ground breaking with the motion tracking tech and the entire game package seems too small and casual to become a huge success for Microsoft.
Rare has a great pedigree as a game developer and it would have been interesting to see what they could have done with Kinect if they were given more freedom to explore innovative uses and more niche activities.
Story
Kinect Sports Rivals has tried to introduce a mythology, about an island full of activities where every newcomer is ready to try out the activities he is most interested in, while competing against his friends and rivals, but it is really not worth exploring in any way.
Basically, gamers have access to six sports that they can master: tennis, bowling, jet skiing, football, rock climbing and target shooting, each of them simulated in a unique way using the Kinect Sports Rivals.
The beauty of Kinect Sports Rivals is that, as the name implies, each player can create his own narrative about epic competitions and rivalries, but there’s no true narrative introduced by the development team, with the present characters feeling empty and barely sketched.
One of the most impressive elements of the game is the scanning system, which has managed to create an accurate version of my face and body to use in the various activities and feels like the kind of feature that more Xbox One titles should offer.
Gameplay
Wave racing is the first thing I played in Kinect Sports Rivals and I had quite a lot of fun with it, to the point where I actually lost my interest in unlocking the rest right away.
Hand and body motions are well used to control the action and launch tricks and stomping activates power-ups, which makes it easy to understand the activity right away.
Kinect managed to track everything well and I felt almost sad to move to rock climbing, which is somewhat weird and I suspect does not reflect the actual real-world sport in any way.
The mechanics are simple once more, with the hands used to actually grab ledges and pull the character up, but the core mechanics tend to be dull on their own, which means that Rare added traps and competitors that tend to grab legs in order to throw the protagonist off the rock he is climbing.
Target practice involves pointing the hand at the screen to target, while Kinect Sports Rivals automatically fires and an increase in the complexity level is delivered by adding enemy turret fire that needs to be dodged and a light strategic element.
Tennis is a much more complicated activity and encourages gamers to use their entire body to serve and deliver nuanced strikes.
This tends to make the game more exciting than the rest of the activities included in Kinect Sports Rivals and also more tiring, but fans of the sport will probably love its careful simulation of the real-world mechanics.
Bowling is also well simulated by the team at Rare and the Kinect is accurate enough to allow for careful spins and solid strikes, but it takes a lot of time to learn all the possibilities and it certainly helps to have some previous experience with it.
Finally, we have football, which many will see as the main feature of Kinect Sports Rivals, but unfortunately, it is the most disappointing of the included sports.
The accuracy is poor and the game is too focused on passing down the field through fusball-like obstacles before the real action starts.
Kinect Sports Rivals is a mixed bag when it comes to the included sports, but at least three out of the six, wave racing, tennis and bowling, are well designed and could keep players interested in the long term.
As players become proficient with all the included activities, they gather fans on the island and they can unlock new content like outfits and stages, although they never feel like meaningful additions.
Graphics and audio
Kinect Sports Rivals clearly benefits from the solid computing power offered by the Xbox One and delivers a very good-looking experience that never seems slow and never drops frames, which is crucial given the constant connection between what is happening on screen and the actions of the player.
The team at Rare has made some bold choices when it comes to the use of bright colors and some stylized elements and, regardless of the event played, the world feels alive and engaging.
The sound design is also well suited to the experience, but I never felt like it added to the excitement in any significant way.
Multiplayer
Kinect Sports Rivals uses an asynchronous multiplayer system, which means that the avatars of other owners of the game are downloaded to a local copy in order to provide competition, presumably based on their overall performance in the title.
Conclusion
Kinect Sports Rivals is clearly not going to be a huge hit and will not be remembered as the title that finally made the Kinect motion tracking system a central element of the Xbox One as a gaming system.
The number of offered activities is just too small to keep gamers entertainment in the long term and it’s unlikely that Rare will be able to offer too many interesting new sports via downloadable content packs.
The game can also quickly become a little repetitive and it’s never entirely clear why moving to accomplish certain actions is better than simply using a controller for the same thing.
At the same time, there’s a lot to love in the game for those who are looking for a video game experience that’s mostly fun, well calibrated and asks them to do something other than simply shooting aliens or racing cars.
The Xbox One’s version of the Kinect is a clear evolution over the first implementation, which was associated with the Xbox 360, but the technology has not been used to its full potential up until now.
Rare is a good developer, but Microsoft seems to have forced them to keep the gameplay mechanics rather classic, with no major risks and no attempts to deliver a disruptive experience.
It will be interesting to see what indie companies, who have more limited resources and more freedom, will create in the coming months.
Until then, Kinect Sports Rivals will remain an interesting experiment that never manages to live up to the expectations linked to it.
