Zonrith1
301,382
TA Score for this game: 4,652
Posted on 15 January 12 at 17:01, Edited on 07 April 13 at 04:49 |
This review has 9 positive votes and 0 negative votes. Please log in to vote. |
Description
Wipeout 2 is a platform title built around the hit TV show (for those not familiar, the television program Wipeout is essentially a game show consisting of several obstacle courses, each of which whittle down the competitors until a winner is determined; the courses are designed to be failed repeatedly and most people watch to see people get knocked around and fail). It is a Kinect game, and so to engage in the platforming one is required to perform proxy actions in-person to get the in-game avatar to navigate the obstacle courses.
While I have not played another Wipeout game (most notably the previous Kinect version), I am familiar with the show, and familiar with Kinect games. So, broadly speaking, for my review I ask myself two questions:
1) Does this game feel like Wipeout, the show?
2) How good of a Kinect game is it?
The answers, again broadly, are "yeah" and "it's alright". On to the details!
Graphics/Sound (7/10)
Graphically, this game is nothing special. Like several other Kinect titles, it has that cartoony look of the Xbox avatars (and, indeed, you can play as your avatar). This works, but it isn't impressive. The courses do look like the show's courses, and so it definitely looks like Wipeout, and playing you are so busy trying to make your jumps and dodge obstacles that it would be hard to really appreciate much graphically. Still, I think they could have polished it more. In particular, the booth scenes (with the two announcers) look goofy, and the voice match-ups to the mouth movements are poor. This game, fully installed to the hard disk, isn't even 1GB, so there isn't much excuse other than laziness.
However, my overall assessment of the score does rebound significantly due to the sound. They got the actual voices from the show involved, and given a lot of the humor of Wipeout comes from the two announcers, it definitely aids greatly in immersion to hear them mocking your failures and praising your successes. I would have liked there to be more lines recorded, but that's something that comes up in any game you invest much time in. Overall, I think they did a good job on the voicing commentary. Music obviously plays a small role, and they were wise to let the commentary be the primary focus of play.
Controls (4/10)
The controls are flawed. They aren't the worst I've encountered in a Kinect game, but they're worse than some launch titles like Kinect Sports, Dance Central, and Kinect Adventures. Really, there's not much excuse in that, especially since this is the second Wipeout title for Kinect (I can't say if it's an improvement, control-wise, over the first, but compared to other titles it still is lacking). This falls into two categories:
1) Poor proxy choices. By this I mean what you, as a person, have to do to get the in-game character to do something. Overall, this is a relatively minor issue, because I think most of the proxy actions are good. The problem is that most of them behave in a first-person fashion, but not all. You run in place to run forward, jump to jump, crouch to slide, and so forth. Like you are actually doing the activities. This works well, but then one of the major components, jumping, has you lean right to go forward and left to go backwards. Why not lean forwards and backwards? Dance Central would have you do so (proving it can be done), and that would have kept things in the first-person perspective. Instead, you have to treat directional jumping like a third-person observer, while almost everything else you do requires you to behave like a first-person participant. It's confusing!
2) Poor detection. This is where the frustration really set in for me. Now, as I noted earlier, this isn't the worst I've seen. The game does a pretty good job of seeing your leans, and detecting your jumps and crouches. These are the bulk of your actions. However, it does a less swell job on the running. Getting going was never a problem, but there were times where I would stop running in place but my character would continue. I'd give the Stop command, and the character would stop, but as soon as I dropped my Stop gesture the character would resume, even with my feet planted. Given the precision on some of the obstacles, a lot of my challenges became battles with detection to know when I wanted to NOT move, versus actually trying to figure out the timing of some swinging rope or rotating pillar. Repeated failures due to the game not understanding its own command gestures becomes frustrating in short order.
Controls are also hampered by a few bad gesture decisions. Stop and Move Backward are the same gesture (the latter just requires you to hold it longer); a problem especially given the aforementioned glitch where it would often resume the character's running as soon as the Stop motion is dropped. Also, Skip Replay and Skip Ahead are the same motion, and so if you get confused you could accidentally skip to the next obstacle (this carries a heavy time penalty which compromises a lot of achievements). In the end I just turned off replays to avoid confusion.
Story (5/10)
It's hard really to expect a story since the show doesn't have one. As such, I'm judging this category by how it captures the essence of the show. I think it does an average job. There are three main differences that result in it not being a near-perfect mirror of the TV program:
1) Little commentary regarding backstory. The game has a number of characters that have a backstory, but it's really only touched on between the episodes and at the end of the rounds. It's not used during the obstacles. I'm sure this was to save on the number of voice lines to be recorded, but the show features this heavily (it's the bulk of the show!), so it just makes the game feel... less.
2) Only four competitors. Instead of starting with 24 competitors and working down to four (originally the final zone had four players; I note this because now the show goes down to three players for the final zone), the game starts with four and ends with four. So it doesn't feel like anyone is getting eliminated... because they aren't. It's a significant departure conceptually, though I understand why it works better this way for the game.
3) The rules are different. In Wipeout 2, your times for the various sections are added together. The winner is whoever ends with the lowest time. In the show, the times are only important for determining who advances to the next round. The winner is whoever has the shortest time in the final zone, regardless of how they did in the earlier sections. My assumption is this combined-time mechanic is to adjust for there being no eliminations whatsoever, but it's quite a different concept. I had games where I crushed the competition in the final zone only to lose because of decisions I made early in the game. I didn't realize what was going on when I first started playing.
Replay Value (6/10)
This game has decent replay value, if only for the achievements. The game consists of eight episodes, four themed as summer and four as winter. The summer and winter episodes each have two final zones to draw upon, and they have their own version of the second and third rounds (always the same). The first round varies for every episode, though again, within the seasonal theme there are certain consistencies. There are achievements related to doing certain actions with various characters, and an achievement for beating each episode within a certain time. The time runs require a lot of practice, and thus there is significant replay just in mastering those obstacles.
The game also has replay-value from a party-game perspective, since the episodes are short, but given only two players can go at any one time (and it's local-only multiplayer), I think most people will dismiss it in favor of a game that can support more people in competition.
"Fun" Factor (5/10)
My time in Wipeout 2 was alright. I was often frustrated by the controls, but I figured out ways around the problems well enough that I was willing to invest the time to full-clear the title. Overall, I'd say fans of the TV show that would like to try a Kinect platformer may want to give this a try, but people easily frustrated by Kinect when it doesn't detect properly should stick to the AAA titles for the device. Not to mention there is nothing compelling about this game for people who know nothing of the show (well, other than the seductive TA ratios that many Kinect titles have!).
I played through all eight episodes multiple times to obtain all achievements. All play was done in single-player (achievements requiring two-player mode I did with either a high-backed desk chair or a coat rack).
Overall score average: 5.4
Score-to-Star Translation Guide:
5 stars: 9.01 to 10 (out of 10)
4.5 stars: 8.01 to 9
4 stars: 7.01 to 8
3.5 stars: 6.01 to 7
3 stars: 5.01 to 6
2.5 stars: 4.01 to 5
2 stars: 3.01 to 4
1.5 stars: 2.01 to 3
1 star: 1.01 to 2
0.5 stars: 0 to 1
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