14 DAY TRIAL // Kinect Sports Rivals is certainly not the video game to make the Kinect motion tracking system an essential element of modern gaming or to deliver a significant boost in terms of sales to the Xbox One, but the Rare-created title has generated some questions about the link between the virtual and the real and which one is more interesting to experience.
The game delivers six activities, all of them based on actual sports, which the player can first learn and then master while battling ever-improving opponents.
While I was playing Kinect Sports Rivals, I came to appreciate the way it portrayed jet ski racing and bowling and I was fairly disappointed with how the developers chose to simulate tennis, football, rock climbing and target shooting.
I have never gone jet skiing and I suspect that I would be uncomfortable actually paying for such an activity, even if I could find the time for it, which means that I was happy to play the in-game version, which features mines, power-ups and tricks that would be impossible to perform in the real world.
The control system used by the Kinect game is also fairly intuitive and interesting and adds a constant sense of tension and excitement, even if the actual opponents are never a major threat when it comes to the result.
On the other hand, I played bowling, at an amateur level, for about two full years of my life and I loved the experience even if I have never been too good at it.
The sport mixes physics, control of the body and careful planning and it’s exhilarating to deliver a good strike that featured the smallest possible amount of luck.
In Kinect Sports Rivals, the movements associated with bowling are similar to those in the real world and I have even managed to trigger pain in the exact same muscle that troubled me when I was going to the alley with my friends.
But the video game does not manage to enhance the experience in any sort of way and after playing about one hour of simulated bowling, I only wanted to shut down the Xbox One and go out with friends.
Simulated experiences tend to focus on activities and feelings that most people cannot access in the real world and one of the major mistakes of Kinect Sports Rivals is that it makes reality more attractive than its own motion tracking powered island.