Two player co-op and Online Play
River Rush and Reflex Ridge are the most physical of the five games. In River Rush, you ride a raft down a turbulent stretch of jungle river, jumping to speed up and swipe collectibles and moving left and right to navigate through the course. It's a fast course, so you're constantly on the move trying to adjust your position so you can hurtle up a ramp, collect coins, or avoid a head on collision with a rock. Reflex Ridge is similar in structure, but this time you’re ducking, jumping and side-stepping to avoid obstacles. As with all the mini-games in Kinect Adventures, your reactions have to be sharp and it gets quite physical when you hit the second and third tiers where your speed and balance is tested to the max.The final game is Space Pop, which is the weakest of the selection, but still another game that showcases just how well Kinect works. Here, you're confined to small space and need to flap your arms to fly around to pop bubbles. You need to use the whole room to catch all the bubbles, so you'll be dashing around waving your arms trying frantically to burst them all before they disappear, while moving backwards and forwards as new waves of bubbles arrive. It's a good tech demo of the sensor, but it lacks the fun factor of the other games.
The reward of achieving medals and trying to get to gold standard by beating record times, isn't really enough motivation for us to want to continue playing Kinect Adventures over and over again, but as a showcase of Kinect's abilities it does a good job. Kids, however, may well get further replay value from playing co-op mode and online, or unlocking achievements and avatar awards. They'll also have a giggle creating one of the living statue characters that you unlock, where you can move and talk into the Kinect microphone and then see your movements and hear your voice come to life through a range of cartoon characters.
Kinect Adventures offers a set of simplistic set of mini-games that aren't going to keep many people coming back for more, but the playability and fun factor may appeal to young families. As our first gaming experience of Kinect, we’ve been really impressed with how well the sensor works and how it creates a new level of interaction between you and the game. While it's likely that Kinect Adventures will be forgotten about in few month's time, anyone who picks it up will enjoy the novelty of the new technology; and considering you get it for free, you can't really moan about the lack of quality content either.
