MotionSports Adrenaline attempts to take six “extreme sports” and bring them to life with motion control on the Kinect, Move, and Wii. I spent part of the weekend with the PS3 version, using the Move, and would not recommend this game to anyone.
The sports included are wingsuit diving, rock climbing, mountain biking, kayaking, skiing, and kitesurfing. All games are available from the get-go, and each has two or three levels, and one or two single player modes, and the same modes for two player. Each game plays almost exactly the same from a control standpoint, and frankly, none of them generate any sort of excitement or realism. Controls are spotty too, which I half expected, honestly.
I began my adventure with rock climbing. Before I could play, I had to calibrate my controller, which is not uncommon. To do so, you select if you are left or right handed, then you hold the Move above your shoulder, below your waist, and at your waist. You have to do this same calibration every-single-time you start up a game. Yes, MotionSports, I’m still right-handed like I was four minutes ago…
I wouldn’t mind the constant calibrations if the game itself just worked better and was more enjoyable. It’s not like this is the first Move game to require a lot of calibrating. But, as I immediately found out in trying to get my character to climb this rock wall, the controls were what I’m all too familiar with in seeing in these mini-game cash-in compilation motion games: inconsistent to the point of frustration. Per the game’s instructions, climbing controls involve a lot of flicking to get your player to literally jump from one rock hold to another. There are also controls for reaching across to a hold, i.e., in a diagonal fashion. These didn’t work well, and the fun factor hit rock bottom, pun intended. To shake things up a bit, you encounter some brief aftershocks that shake the screen and could force you to lose your hold (meaning you’ll drop down to the next closest one). There are also areas where a boulder — of the same dimensions, falling in the same trajectory — will drop every so often. You can avoid this path, or if you Adrenaline meter is full, press T to literally form a bubble shield around your entire body for a short period of time. If you do get hit square on the head with the falling boulder though, fear not, there is no penalty and if you do it three times, you get a Trophy.
So, rock climbing was not a success at all. On to mountain biking. Here, as in at least half of the other games, you bring your elbow in and point the motion controller to the left, and hold T, and push forward to accelerate. You also lean to the left and right to make turns, and hold T and quickly raise your arm(s) up to jump over small gaps.
My time trial begins and my character is automatically accelerating, I only need to do my motion controls to speed up if I want to. I’m playing along, bumping and clipping through some objects, making some perfect turns and not so perfect ones. I got this sneaking suspicion that something wasn’t right with the controls and I decide to literally put the Move controller behind my back. The game pops up a warning, saying that it’s out of view, but, guess what? My biker is still going, bouncing off of walls and automatically taking a path at y-splits and jumping. The game was literally playing by itself. I got a bronze medal for maybe a half a track’s worth of actual interaction, the game played the rest by itself. What the?
Discouraged, I went on to wingsuit diving. The controls were nearly identical to the mountain biking ones and the mode starts with your player hopping out of an aircraft. The idea — just like with all of the other modes — is to finish as quickly as you can and grab all the coins and do all of the “strike a pose” things you can, or want. The other modes play out in exactly the same way. The game literally won’t let you lose, no matter how badly you are playing or how long it takes you to do anything.
From a presentation standpoint, MotionSports Adrenaline looks like a first gen 360 game. Expect low polygon counts, bland textures and objects, and lots of clipping. The “coins” make the game world look even worse, similar to the pickups in Bodycount if you happened to have played that game. The framerate is good at least. The audio on the other hand is ok, but nothing to write home about. Oh and I hope you like Degree; yeah, the deodorant company. Ads and sponsorship for Degree is blanketed all over this game, from the insert in the game box to the numerous logos in the actual game.
To the summary…