| Author | DLC Review |
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Ozzpot
257,055
Posted on 03 April 12 at 08:40, Edited on 17 April 12 at 15:42
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This dlc review has 5 positive votes and 0 negative votes. Please log in to vote. |
This small DLC pack adds what is probably the most glaring omission in the Kinect Sports series so far: Basketball.
There are three minigames to play with:
"3-point Hero" has you shooting 3-pointers as you might imagine, in sets of 5 shots, each set from a different distance and angle. It feels good, accurate, and oddly satisfying, but there's little more to say about it.
"Shot Party" is more like a free throw situation. You shoot from mid distance, directly in front of the hoop, but you must also hit discs that are rotating in a ring around the hoop as you score. Hit the silver discs, avoid the black ones. Bonus multipliers are offered for chaining together hits, time penalties for hitting black discs.
"Alley-Oop Dreams" has you passing to team-mates as they charge the hoop. They come from the left and right, some require a low pass as they run in and dunk, some run in from the sides and get hang time, waiting for a high pass to score with an alley-oop. pass to green team-members, avoid passing to opposition red players.
Alley-Oop Dreams was the only minigame that had trouble interpreting my motions, a little frustrating and rather inexplicable when it would play a high right pass instead of a low left, and it would make mistakes like this regularly, but after some practise it is easy to hone your technique into a very deliberate and exaggerated one that the sensor fully understands.
There is no "full game", i.e you can't play a game of basketball against the AI or a human opponent in the same way as you can with the other sports such as Tennis or Football. The three minigames are all you get, but you can of course play them against others.
The achievements are very easy. I got all three of the 3-Point Hero achievements on my very first go, smashing the high score that one achievement requires - something that is unusual for Kinect Sports; the high scores required for achievements are usually very tough to achieve. The other two minigames offered up their achievements almost as easily too, the hardest being the 15 successful passes in a row in Alley-Oop Dreams, but only because of my issues with the game interpreting my motions. Despite that, it's a guaranteed 250/250 inside 20 minutes, which I don't think is in it's favour. They could at least double the required high scores for example, and the achievement that requires you to score 200 baskets in total (cumulative) is likely to be done before you've even finished playing all three minigames. It could so easily have been 1000, and probably should've been.
Overall this is a nice bit of DLC, with shiny colourful graphics that we are used to in KS2, decent variation in minigames I guess, and a nice feel to the gameplay. My only criticisms would be that you can't play an actual game in any way, just the minigames, and the achievements are just way too easy. Replay value will likely depend on whether you have friends who are big fans of the game, and you enjoy competing with their high scores via the challenge system.
At only 400msp though, this DLC still represents good value, and is a great addition to KS2.
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