More misfit than adrenaline
Kinect has already seen quite a few games that don’t seem terribly different from one another. Kinect Sports seems identical to Motion Sports, Dance Central is like Dance Masters, and Your Shape Fitness Evolved seems just like The Biggest Loser: Ultimate Workout. True to form, many people will notice that Adrenaline Misfits looks very similar to Sonic Free Riders. Sure, one of them uses a hover board and the others uses a snowboard, but we know what’s really going on here. They’re both games about leaning back and forth periodically. But whereas each of the duos listed above has one standout title, this pairing is unfortunately terrible across the board.
Adrenaline Junkies has pretty much all the same problems that I complained of in my Sonic Free Riders review, but this game has even more issues. At its heart, Adrenaline Misfits is a standard snowboarding game. The ad campaign gloriously touts, “it’s not just a race, it’s a battle!” Apart from being a wicked comma splice, it’s also not really true. It’s pretty much just a race. There’s some light combat with power-ups, but that doesn’t save it from being completely mundane.
The best thing that I can say about Adrenaline Misfits is that the camera at least works decently. As with every Kinect boarding game, you sway back and forth to turn in the corresponding direction. It works decently most of the time, but Kinect does have a tough time registering your jumps, which I found particularly annoying. For the most part, you just race down the hill, occasionally using power-ups to knock down your opponent. Like I said, it’s very standard. It works well most of the time, and there’s some fun to be had when you pull off some neat moves. For the most part though, you’re just stuck doing the same stuff over and over again. The trick competitions don’t offer much deviation either.
Pulling off crazy tricks essentially amounts to lifting one knee or twisting your body. This is hardly an immersive way to execute near-suicidal maneuvers. At that point we might as well be pushing buttons; there’s not much tactile difference.
Where Adrenaline Misfits runs into problems is with its courses. The tracks will occasionally include turns that have a billboard or other obstruction along the turn wall. The levels are sloped in such a way that you can end up pinned against the obstruction with no way out. The downward sloping continues to push you into the obstacle, and it will take you minutes to actually get out. That’s if you get out at all; you may just need to quit altogether. Either way, when it happens you’re guaranteed to lose the race.
There are two things that I really enjoyed about Adrenaline Misfits. The first is that it’s only $40. It’s still massively overpriced, but it’s nice to see a developer acknowledging their game isn’t worth as much as competitors. At least the price tag is a small warning to the consumer not to expect as much as a $60 game. Ideally, Adrenaline Misfits would have been a $10-$15 Xbox Live Arcade game, but a ten-dollar price reduction is still thoughtful.
The second thing I liked was the menu design. I know it’s boring stuff. But truly Adrenaline Misfits has one of the best menu interfaces of any Kinect game released at launch. When you’re selecting something off of the menu screen, you simply hold your right arm straight out to the right if you want to scroll that way, and do the opposite with your left hand if you want to go the other way. When you want to select something, you just raise your right arm. That’s it. Compared with Microsoft Game Studios awful first-party system of using a hand as a point-and-click mouse, this system blows it away. It’s a shame that it had to be attached to one of the worst games to release for the system.
Your opinion of the graphics in Adrenaline Misfits will depend largely on what demographic you fall into. If you’re an adult, you’ll probably find the ridiculous cartoony graphics to be tacky and contrived. They’re essentially a mélange of everything “totally rad” over the last twenty years. Characters wear baggy jeans, tons of jewelry, and gnarly shirts. However, if you’re a kid, you’ll probably have no problem with this at all. In fact, certain types of kids might actually enjoy it. At the very least, it’s a very milquetoast way for parents to entertain kids with edgy fashion.
Microsoft was clearly trying to take a piece from Nintendo’s gaming industry pie when it released Kinect, but if there are too many games like Adrenaline Misfits released for the system, it’s going to get harder for them to convert new customers. The last thing you want is a game like Adrenaline Misfits being a customer’s only experience with the system, and that will undoubtedly happen. There will be people who only buy this one game and people who try it at a store kiosk. Those people will likely not be convinced of the great things this system is capable of.
Right now, Microsoft is emulating Nintendo’s strategy almost exactly, and Adrenaline Misfits is a pretty perfect example of that. They’re illustrating quite clearly that they’re not interested in ensuring that the games released on this new system are quality. Sonic Free Riders, Kinect Joy Ride, and Adrenaline Misfits are clear examples of that. It’s very likely that this effect is exactly what led to Nintendo’s increasing fall from the top of the charts. It’s one thing to go out in the holiday season and convert millions of new customers. It’s another thing entirely to give those consumers high-quality gaming experiences. If Microsoft isn’t careful, they’ll end up with a deluge of shovelware (a term that came into popular use precisely because of the enormous load of terrible Wii games) and tons of customers who wind up with games that aren’t fun. This is a bad long-term business strategy for the company and a bad deal for gamers.
Adrenaline Misfits isn’t really going to appeal to anyone. If you’ve got extremely deep pockets and want to try out every experience Kinect offers then (and only then) should you try this game. It will give you a decent feel of the boarder genre and a look at a nice menu system. Unfortunately, that’s really it.
RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 2.5 Graphics
There’s nothing especially bad about the graphics, but nothing good either. The character designs are tacky, and levels are bland. 3.5 Control
The Kinect sensor does a good job of mapping your actions on screen, except for jumps. 2.0 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
There’s very little even worth mentioning. Tacky voiceovers, and super rad music. 2.0 Play Value
The game mechanics are barely competent, and there’s not a ton of noteworthy things to do. You’ll probably become bored very quickly after you’ve done the same few things over and over. 2.2 Overall Rating – Poor
Not an average. See Rating legend above for a final score breakdown.
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