Fighter Within

An Xbox One exclusive, Kinect-only fighting game, that should speak for itself. Let me make a list of all the issues present in this game, and I feel as if there may be a running theme here. The Kinect cannot comprehend the most basic of hand movements. It recognises my face, my roommate’s face, my girlfriend’s face, his girlfriend’s face when they enter the room, but it cannot manage the simple act of a lone person raising an arm in front of it. Why? I don’t know, but because of this the entire game is left broken, frustrating and exhausting to play.

I stood in the middle of the living room flailing around like a doped-up feral cat that just stumbled onto a pile of catnip, trying not just to play but to navigate the menus. Occasionally the Kinect recognises my punches and kicks and the on-screen character reacts similarly, after a slight delay, but the majority of the time my fighter embodies the awkward stupidity of my frantic, catnip-induced seizure, formally called gameplay mechanics. The game even includes “complex moves” like combos, throws, counters and specials, but they’re near impossible to pull off. You’re supposed to build a “Ki” meter to unleash powerful attacks, except you can’t deliberately unleash them: every successful combo or attack inevitably results from luck, and luck is not a good mechanic for a fighting game. Whatever flow does occur is repeatedly halted by an “awesome” cinematic that stops you flailing for a minute and forces you to stand like an idiot and watch before you can continue flailing.

But let’s not pin all the blame on the Kinect, the game itself is a travesty. I’d have thought the next generation of consoles would introduce a fighting game that strays from stereotypical, racist and sexist characters, but I’d be wrong: scantily clothed women, a Scot in a kilt, a ninja, a sensei, a miscellaneous tribal-tattoo guy, two token black characters ranging from DJ to dark voodoo magic, ’90s-looking Americans and a Russian woman who looks like a prostitute. It doesn’t matter who you play as, anyway, fighting styles and special moves are all the same and all result from the same action: flailing. I ended up picking characters purely on aesthetics or whoever was less annoying, though even selection is hard with Oscar-worthy dialogue like “I gotta run, someone’s waiting for me.” “Yeah, my knuckles.”

Normally, for a first-time experiment, I’d cut the developers some slack, but this isn’t a first attempt. Fighter Within is a sequel to the equally horrible 2010 Kinect title Fighters Uncaged, the only difference being graphical improvements that barely qualify as improvements. And best of all, it’s developed under Ubisoft, the people behind the Tom Clancy titles, Far Cry 3 and Assassin’s Creed. I’d have thought they were smart enough not to taint their name with a project like this, but again, I was wrong.

All in all, I don’t even know what I can say about this game. It’s unplayable. It isn’t enjoyable. The Kinect fails to work effectively, and I honestly regret wasting my time with this atrocity. There’s no salvaging a fighting game whose fundamental input, your own body, the hardware can’t reliably read, and no amount of roster or presentation could fix that. 2 out of 10.