Motionsports Adrenaline Review (X360 Kinect)

• Kinect Sensor Required
• Publisher: Ubisoft
• Developer: Ubisoft Vancouver
• ESRB Rating: “E" for Everyone
• Genre: Extreme Sports
• Pros: Interesting selection of sports; nice presentation; good menus; multiplayer options
• Cons: Control lag; many sports have very similar controls; sort of feels "on rails"; linear events

Motionsports Adrenaline is a collection of six extreme sports - mountain biking, skiing, kayaking, rock climbing, wingsuit flying, and kite boarding. Each sport has a couple of courses along with a couple of single-player modes (collecting coins, doing tricks, speed runs) as well as multiplayer variations of those modes. As you play each event, you earn points that level you up and unlock new courses and boosts for the characters. There is a steady stream of unlocks, at least at first (it seems like you unlock 2-3 things after every event), but the total amount of content is kind of surprisingly small and the unlocks dry up pretty fast.

You can play multiplayer in Quick Play where you get to select the events, but you can also play Adrenaline Party where four players compete in 10 random events, and the person or team with the highest total score wins. Adrenaline Party is cool since it streamlines everything and gives you 30+ minutes of content all laid out in front of you without you having to fiddle with the menus.

Speaking of menus, Motionsports Adrenaline uses the Dance Central-style menus (raise or lower hand to select menu item, swipe it to the left to select it) that all of Ubisoft's 2011 Kinect titles have used. This is our favorite menu system for Kinect, and it works great here.

Mountain Biking - Just a downhill run rather than trail riding, mountain biking is very simple where the course is made up of lanes and you turn left or right with your hands (just like if you were riding a real bike) to switch lanes to avoid obstacles or hit jumps. Some sharp corners require you to smoothly turn into them at the right time in order to maintain speed. And that is pretty much it. It is totally on-rails where you just barrel down the mountain. Not too fun.

Skiing - Skiiing isn't anything new for Kinect, but it seems to be handled a little better here. You lean your body to turn, jump to get more height off of jumps, and push with your poles to get more speed. You also can do tricks, but they are pre-set motions where you have to match a pose on a floating icon with your body, and sometimes you can't see the icon fast enough to get into the right pose. Tricks are a part of many of the events, and they all suffer from this - you can't see the trick quick enough a lot of the time. Overall, though, the skiing does work well and probably controls the best overall.

Rock Climbing - Rock climbing has the most potential out of all of the sports, but is ruined by input lag. The idea is that you are climbing up a rock face full of handholds, so you reach up or to the side or diagonally with one of your hands to climb in that direction, and occasionally you have to jump to boost your character two levels in areas where there isn't a handhold in easy reach. The concept is awesome, but you never really build up a rhythm to your climbing because the controls never respond consistently. We spent a bunch of time on rock climbing and never got closer than about a minute to the gold medal times.

Kayaking - Kayaking is another linear downhill event. You turn by essentially sticking your paddle in the water on the side you want to turn, and can build up speed by paddling back and forth with your hands but we couldn't get it to consistently work. To roll your kayak to go under obstacles, you squat down. Other than "paddling", kayaking controlled okay, actually, and the streams you go down have a couple of branching paths. Because it is all mostly linear, though, there isn't all that much to see.

Kite Surfing - Kite surfing is just like it sounds. You are pulled along the water with a kite, and turn left or right by moving your hands to turn the kite. You can jump and do tricks, and the controls work pretty well.

Wingsuit Flying - Wingsuit flying is pretty simple. You put on a suit with extra fabric on the arms for "wings" and can glide around with the greatest of ease. You turn by raising your hands left or right, speed up by putting your hands at your sides, and slow down by spreading your body out. The courses are sort of boring, though (you aren't zipping around buildings like that scene in "TF3: Dark of the Moon", anyway) and you aren't so much flying as just falling with style.

So, some sports work better than others, and some can even be pretty fun. Our problem with it all, though, is that the controls all feel pretty similar across all of the sports, and since the objective is the same in so many of them (going downhill off a mountain plays a big role in 4 of them) it all feels pretty samey after you do each event once or twice. Riding a bike, sitting in a kayak, skiing, and flying (falling) with a wingsuit shouldn't all feel the same, but they definitely do here. And the one event that is truly different from everything else, rock climbing, just doesn't work that well.

The sound is fine. Pretty forgettable, though.