Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect has launched back in November and we are finally getting around to ‘knock out’ all of the reviews for the new platform. Fighters Uncaged is an Ubisoft published motion tracked fighting game that puts the player into the fight. While this sounds like a perfect fit for a Kinect exclusive motion fighter, the game has several issues that keep it from being a good game. There are solid ideas and concepts here but in the end Fighters Uncaged just has too many problems to work as intended.
When I booted up Fighters Uncaged, I had started up the tutorial in order to get down all the moves before heading into the fights. This training mode went on for about 30 minutes or so and did a good job of explaining the moves and at this point I thought, this game is pretty good.
Players take control of Simon, who has to win a fighting tournament in order to free his father as it was explained in the manual. Don’t be fooled though, there is not any sort of deep story telling or narrative in the game, players will only go from opponent to opponent during the campaign mode.
After the tutorial was completed I started fighting really mean looking guys. I was actually pretty excited to apply my acquired move set against someone who’d fight back; the problem was that the moves do not actually work well enough during fights as the training had led me to believe. The game was not always able to properly detect what I was doing and translate it to the on screen character. Most of the time Simon headbutted someone when I ducked or punched when I did a kick.
There is actually a fairly decent size move set in this title with ducks and dodges, swings and kicks, blocks and headbutts. Players can also use long and short attacks depending on the positioning. The problem, again, was the fact that Fighters Uncaged isn’t responsive enough to detect what moves I was applying. During fights players need to expose the opponents by doing a low leg kick for instance, followed by a punch or returning a hook shot after a successful block. When the moves actually worked and I pulled of a nice combo, I really enjoyed it but more often than not they didn’t work. One gameplay element though that I found either really awesome or really bad (cannot decide at this point), was the power move, in order to fill up the power meter, players needed to dodge several punches or kicks before actually yelling at the sensor to activate it – a strange choice to turn on this ability.
Fighters Uncaged isn’t a super pretty game but it looks decent, there aren’t any big crowds to speak of though, which would have helped the atmosphere. Speaking of environments, there was not much ambient noise either since the audio mostly consisted of grunting and the occasional curses. Also lacking is any sort of online component, it is pretty much a single player experience but that may be due to the current control scheme.
Fighters Uncaged was a game I had some high hopes for but it failed to deliver on its promise of putting you into the fight. I didn’t mind the lackluster fluff around the game but the fact that the actual controls did not work breaks the experience. If Ubisoft decides to create a sequel to Fighters Uncaged though, it could still become a good game as the Kinect sensor would be fully capable of delivering good input responses. The first round is not a knock out.
Score: 5.5
Fighters Uncaged was developed by AMA Studios and published by Ubisoft for the Xbox 360 on November 4th. A copy of the game was provided to us by Ubisoft for reviewing purposes.
