PixlBit

You'll definitely be driving it like it's stolen.

Thanks to the Kinect Booth at my local mall, I had the opportunity to go hands on (body on?) with Kinect Joy Ride for a single race with Contributing Writer, Jason Hillhouse.

Things didn't start well upon Jason and I stepping up to the screen in order to play. The on-screen cursor, controlled by my hand, seemed to jump around wildly with two people in the Kinect's frame of view. Every time I thought I could get my hand over the "Try Again" button the cursor jumped to a random spot on the screen after I had just barely moved my hand.

Eventually I was able to get the race started, which put both Jason and myself into separate vehicles. Because there are no controllers involved at all, the car moved automatically at a set pace when the light turned green, and the only two abilities at our disposal were boosting and steering. Both functions were simple in their design; steering required players to hold their hands out and hold an invisible steering wheel, and move it as one would expect. Boosting involved pulling the "steering wheel" toward your body to charge it, followed by a subsequent rapid push forward to execute the boost.

As we made our way around the track, giant ramps were happened upon which allowed us to move our torsos to execute tricks like spins and flips. During the demo, it wasn't apparent why players should execute these moves, as they didn't provide a boost or any sort of bonus for proper execution.

While controlling the game is simple in concept, in practice, things didn't go quite as smooth. Steering occasionally worked without issue, but things weren't consistent enough to create immersion. It felt as if the game wasn't often picking up on subtle motion, causing turns to be erratic and unpredictable.

The implementation of boosting was also frustrating. Pulling in to charge the boost seemed to remove steering control, likely because the Kinect can't detect your hands as accurately when they are tight to your torso. This meant that boosting couldn't be activated enough to truly be fun.

Assuming all of these issues were to be alleviated by final release, Joy Ride suffers other problems inherently related to the experience itself. Overall, it just feels gimmicky, and by the time Jason and I finished the first race, we agreed it was kind of neat that it could detect us in such a manner, but as a game experience it wasn't terribly interesting.

Given that, Kinect Joy Ride is going to have a hard time holding the interest of gamers or even earning their dollars in the first place.