Sports Island Freedom

Imagine, if you will, the scene in the Hudson Soft boardroom. "Oh, so Microsoft's new motion sensor thing is coming out tomorrow." says one of the marketing chimps. A disinterested CEO looks up over his bi-focals. "Okay, so our sports compilation title is ready to go for launch day, obviously," he says, confident that his minions are on top of things. "Our what? Oh, no sir, no, we haven't got one." ...awkward silence... "You haven't done a sports compilation game for a new motion sensing gaming device, that's due on store shelves tomorrow?" asks the chief, through gritted teeth. "Not as such, no", the answer comes, in the nervous tone of a man wishing his chair would swallow him whole. "Well then. You've got the rest of the afternoon to get it done, I'd recommend you get started."

While I might not have any proof that that conversation happened, I can say that playing the atrocity that is Hudson Soft's Sports Island Freedom has left me with the distinct feeling that it was hastily slapped together in one afternoon. Possibly by chimpanzees. If you've been wondering just how badly broken a Kinect game could possibly be, this is your answer. You would think that making a successful Kinect-based sports compilation game would be as easy as pie, since the whole motion sensor gaming vibe is so well suited to this sort of thing, but Hudson Soft has managed to prove that it's very possible to make a severe mess of things.

Sports Island Freedom is a compilation of ten sports, including tennis, beach volleyball, archery, kendo, mogul skiing, figure skating, dodgeball, snowboarding, paintball and boxing, with each event being a very simplified version of the real thing. The overall impression for most of the sports on show here is that, firstly, the developers were extremely lazy in their execution of each event, and secondly, no one actually play tested this rubbish before it was burnt onto discs and shoved onto store shelves. Had someone been locked away for a few days to test these sports they would surely have noted that a lot of Sports Island Freedom is barely playable, let alone enjoyable.

It's hard to put my finger on exactly what makes this title so unpleasant. Not because the reasons are somehow hidden, but because there are just so many glaring flaws to choose from, but let's start with the navigation system. By now we're accustomed to the Kinect way of doing things, which is to hover a hand over a button for a few seconds until it is selected. Sports Island Freedom uses the same concept, but even this the developers have managed to get horribly wrong. Your hand icon snaps to the button as you would expect it to, but unless you have the steady hand of a Marine Corps sniper the icon 'un-snaps' before the button is selected. Instead it ends up in between the buttons - which are too close to one another and too sensitive. Other times the hand icon disappears completely and without explanation, and you are somehow expected to guess that you must raise your hand to select the button on screen. Yes, I've spent a paragraph complaining about this issue, but it's so damn annoying, you all need to be sufficiently warned.

Compounding this problem is the presentation and menu system itself. Menu screens are often cluttered and untidy, and at the same time bland and lifeless, using the sort of fonts and dull colours you would expect to see on governmental institutions' paperwork. Sometimes you really have to look carefully at a screen just to figure out which button to select, the hallmark of a badly streamlined navigation system.

Once you've managed to hack your way through the menu maze and out into the sunshine for your first event, things look a little more cheerful at least. The venues for most of the events are bright and the characters are colourful, but the colour will soon drain from your world once you try to actually play the sports. Each event starts off with the choice to learn the ropes with a tutorial, but these are a tedious and long-winded affair which will complain over and over that you are doing the wrong thing but won't tell you what you are doing wrong. It's intensely frustrating, but that's par for the course for the game as a whole.

Some events, such as tennis and boxing, are better suited to motion sensor gaming than others, but even here the 'simple' sports are riddled with annoying issues. Take tennis for example, which suffers from severe lag and some amazingly inaccurate depth perception, making it close to impossible to play with any real success. Sure, there will be a few occasions where you will string a short rally together, but these are few and far between. Most of the time you are either serving aces or being served aces by your opponent, or you're swinging wildly at a ball that has flown by ages ago. Or hasn't reached you yet. It's hard to know the difference.

Boxing, beach volleyball and snowboarding fare slightly better, but they too suffer from a clumsy and random control system. Strangely enough, the one sport which didn't have me close to tears was the figure skating, and that can only be because it doesn't rely on you actually controlling your character. Instead you just have to mimic the poses shown on the ice as you skate past them, like some sort of ice ballet Quicktime event. Take note, just because this event didn't have me wanting to break something doesn't mean that it's particularly fun to play, it's just not as mind-bendingly awful as the rest. Dodgeball seems to have no interest in taking note of your movements and seems to do its own thing, while the Kendo event refused to let me do the sword strikes I was trying to do but also managed to let me win every time. Mogul Skiing is a pointless way to spend thirty seconds, asking nothing more of you than to bob up and down like a demented flamingo until you cross the finish line with an ungraceful trick-jump. For the life of me I couldn't get the hang of the archery event, so I'll just leave it at that.

The control mechanism for most of these events feels imprecise and unrealistic, and it never feels like you are really playing the sports portrayed. Special mention has to be made of the paintball event, because this is the one sport which gives us an idea of how developers may execute first-person shooter control via Kinect. Let's just say that if this is the future of FPS gaming, then I want nothing to do with it. This is the one event which really stands out as a monumental failure above the rest. Instead of darting around with the agility of a hyperactive mongoose, playing paintball here comes down to staggering around like a drunk, swaying and flailing around and jerking one arm to fire. It's not an elegant solution, in fact, it's a down right joke.

To compliment the gameplay which is not unlike some sort of inhumane torture method, the atmosphere generated by the soundtrack and general sound effects is suitably unpleasant. The visuals may be cheerful enough, but the monotonous music will be drilling through your skull within your first ten minutes of play. Kinect Sports hit it right on the button with its selection of popular licensed tracks to get players pumped up, but this dreary playlist of generic trash is just terrible. Likewise, the lack of any announcers or commentary at all just shows how unfinished this game really is.

If you can somehow stomach more than a few minutes taking part in each event, there is always the option to take part in a league with four teams across all the events, or a tournament where players compete in a chosen sport. Teams can also be created and edited, but only the extremely masochistic among you will ever like this game enough to bother with any of that. If you know someone who perhaps owes you money or deserves unhappiness for some reason, the various events and modes can be played with more than one victim at a time, either locally or on Xbox LIVE. This can only be described as cruel and unusual punishment, and is to be avoided like the plague.

A game like this really makes me question the intentions of the people responsible for it. How desperate are publishers to make a few easy bucks out of the initial rush of Kinect gamers that they would burn this drivel onto a disc and package it as a finished product? Like Robben Island and Alcatraz Island when they were still operational, and the Greek island of Patmos where St. John was exiled, Sports Island Freedom is yet another desolate place of misery for its inhabitants and I would rather lick anthrax powder off of the back of the disc than ever play it again. Sports Island Freedom is officially my nominee for the worst game of the year.

Pros:

When you take the disc out of your console and melt it, the torture ends

Cons:

Gameplay varies between annoying and atrocious
Broken navigation system will have you in tears before the equally frustrating events begin
Severely lacking the fun atmosphere found in competing titles
Might make you want to pop your Kinect in the bin

Rating: