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Deca Sports Freedom Review (X360)

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Deca Sports Freedom Review (X360)Hudson
When only one out of the ten events featured in your game is any good, you pretty much have a disaster on your hands. That is pretty much Deca Sports Freedom in a nutshell. It boasts a nice variety of events, but the execution is so poor in almost all of them, and the menus to navigate between them are so bad, that all of the variety in the world can't save it. There are a couple of bright spots, but you don't pay $40 for mere bright spots.
Game Details

  • Kinect Sensor Required
  • Publisher: Hudson
  • Developer: Hudson
  • ESRB Rating: “E10" for Everyone 10+
  • Genre: Sports
  • Pros: Archery; variety of sports
  • Cons: Awful menus; most sports have awkward, unresponsive controls; so-so presentation

Deca Sports Freedom features ten different events - archery, paintball, boxing, volleyball, figure skating, kendo, dodgeball, snowboarding, tennis, and mogul skiing. All of them struggle with varying degrees of broken controls, lag, and bad animation.

Just getting into and out of the games is a challenge on its own, though, thanks to some surprisingly awful menus. When a little hand pointer actually pops up (and they even label them "L" or "R" for which hand it is, which is kind of nice) the menus aren't bad. You just move the pointer where you want and select stuff like any other Kinect game. That pointer doesn't come up a lot of the time, though. Whether a glitch or by design (almost certainly by design, unfortunately) there is no pointer a lot of the time even though you're asked to select stuff. Instead, you blindly fumble around, pointing at nothing until the game figures you are close enough to something to select it. It is frustrating and awkward and all kinds of terrible. It is a recurring trend with Kinect, though. Bad menus mean bad games 100% of the time, at least with the launch lineup.

Gameplay

Hudson
And the game is unquestionably bad. But, first, there are a couple good parts. Archery works fairly well. You stand parallel to your TV (so Kinect can actually see your form), hold one arm out and "pull the string back" with the other arm, and then sort of flick your rear arm to the side to let go of the string to let the arrow fly. You aim with an onscreen cursor and change its position depending on where your front hand is pointed, and also have to take wind into account. I actually really liked archery. It is simple, but the controls are good and it works surprisingly well. Snowboarding actually also kind of works. You lean forward to go faster and lean forward or back to turn. It isn't super fun, but it works better than the same controls did in Sonic Free Riders, which isn't saying much but at least you can compare it to something.

A sort of mid-range in terms of quality is the paintball. There is a bit of potential here, but isn't executed terribly well. You actually have to move your character around in a first-person perspective. Your feet (as in, you standing in front of Kinect) are basically in an imaginary box, and by stepping forward or backward or left or right, that is how your character moves. You hold one arm out as your "gun", and moving the on-screen cursor to the sides of the screen let you turn (sort of like a Wii FPS). You can see the potential where this could be good someday, but it isn't executed well here. The controls are clunky, slow to respond, and just not all that fun.

Now the bad sports. Tennis suffers from awful lag, yet requires precision timing. It also has a habit of losing your hand when you bring it across your body to try a backhand, so instead of swinging your racket you just do nothing. Boxing also is a second or so behind any movements you're attempting, and also puts your opponent out at a weird range that makes your arms feel like they are 10 feet long. Compared to Kinect Sports boxing, where it was responsive and you actually felt in control, this is pretty much the opposite. Figure skating is a simple matter of matching specific poses as your skater glides around the ice, but isn't very fun. Dodgeball is broken because it doesn't register you trying to catch the ball as it is thrown at you about 90% of the time, so you just stand there and get hit like a moron instead. Mogul skiiing asks you to twist your hips to bounce through the valleys between huge mounds of snow, but it pretty much impossible because Kinect barely registers what your lower body is doing anyway.
Hudson
Graphics

Deca Sports Freedom is pretty bad looking. It uses teams made up of generic Xbox 360 avatars, but not your own avatar. The animation is also pretty bad, as it doesn't necessarily reflect what you are doing in front of Kinect but rather awkward, janky movements programmed into the game. It isn't pretty. The stadiums you perform the various events in are also bland and lack detail.

Sound

The sound is pretty forgettable. Not annoying. Not good. Just sort of there. The only sounds I remember from my play time are people cursing the bad controls.

Bottom Line

Deca Sports Freedom is definitely on the bottom end in terms of quality for Kinect launch titles. It offers a lot of variety with ten sports, each with tournament modes and multiplayer options and all of that stuff, but none of the sports are particularly fun to play thanks to broken controls. And archery, the one thing the game does fairly well, isn't nearly interesting enough to warrant suffering through the other sports and bad menus even as a rental. Skip it.

Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.

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