OXCGN’s Rabbids: Alive & Kicking Review

by: Belgavion

©2011 Gav Ross

A Rabbids mini-game collection on Kinect is so obvious it’s a wonder Ubisoft didn’t push for it as a launch title over a year ago, much the way Rayman Raving Rabbids was a close-to-launch release for the 360 console.

The manic, beady-eyed, near-toothless little creatures and their WarioWare-like party games were decent fun back in 2006, so it makes sense for a similar Kinect offering to be an even more enjoyable experience?

Right? Not quite, it seems.

Rabidly exasperating

Jumping straight into a ‘quick game’ session to see what the Rabbids had to offer resulted in manoeuvring around cumbersome menus (it uses the same ‘swipe’ gesture as seen in other Kinect games such as Dance Central, though nowhere near as precise) and watching a trivial cutscene of hordes of the white critters running around a city before getting to the actual game.

And then, all that was needed in terms of interactive gameplay was another brief horizontal swipe of the hand to cut the cord of a bungee-diving Rabbid; the closer to the ground before cutting the cord, the more points could be accrued.

That was it: one hand swipe; the extent of the entire activity. Thankfully, the majority of the 30 other mini-games included in the package require more than one pointless gesture. One Lemmings-esque level, for example, is a fairly involved lesson in strategy requiring the player to herd multiple Rabbids to a goal, all while moving both hands to operate platforms and ramp.

It sounds simple enough, but add dodgy motion detection to the mix and it becomes a frustrating test of will. That said, it looks like Ubisoft saw more potential in a mini-game like this one as they’ve broken it up into unlockable sub-levels; many of them intelligently designed.

It’s just a pity the controls let everything down.

Glimmers of hope

Another mini-game which had some semblance of potential was named ‘Salmon Rush Day’, which sees the player’s avatar donning a fish suit and swimming upstream through a flooded street, attempting to dodge fishing nets and doing porpoise-like leaps to acquire bonus tokens.

 It feels akin to a level of Kinect Adventures, until you discover the responsiveness is so lacking that the fish doesn’t move left or right across the screen when you move your own body.

After that it’s a struggle to the finish line.

What keeps Rabbids Alive & Kicking from being an inexplicable mess is the fact that not all mini-games are a complete loss; it just depends on how accepting you are of stupidly silly activities.

Take a mini-game like ‘Guitar Zero’ – where the player appears in video form on the screen playing a neon axe. The actual gameplay of strumming the right hand whilst moving the left up and down the neck to correspond with very-slowly falling fret colours isn’t very involved, but there’s something amusing about seeing yourself playing it on the TV.

It’s something you’ll get a laugh out of once and it’s sure to amuse friends and family members, but it grows old after one attempt.

Once more with feeling? No thanks

A pretty good sign that this game hasn’t got much value as far as longevity is concerned is the fact that I never – not even once – felt like repeating a mini-game when prompted. Playing through the list and hoping for some little nugget to stick out that I could at least want to play a few times never eventuated.

 I mean, really, how many times can you attempt something as inane as swinging your head around in a circle while a long, stringy globule of bright green snot is attached, resulting in point scoring by utilising Kinect’s voice detection feature and letting out a ‘shout’ to send the giant goober flying through the air, to be measured like a javelin throw?

Once is constantly enough.

Attempting to get higher scores – or earn more stars as is the case with the points system in place – is something only gluttons for punishment will want to bother with.

Then there’s the mistaken assumption that maybe, just maybe, these vapid mini-games would be more fun with a partner or a group.

Forget it.

 All Rabbids will do is infuriate whoever you are trying to guide through a level with its unresponsiveness and lack of proper tutorials.

Up to 16 players can partake in a few bland ‘party games’, accessible from the main menu and different from the regular levels list, but the time it takes to even set these up makes them purposeless.

If you loved shooting carrot juice into the goggles of these ugly little creatures half a decade ago when the novelty of any new game on the 360 made something worth playing, there may be some limited enjoyment here. Overall, however, it’s hard to rank this too far above the worst Kinect titles released thus far.

4/10

©2011 Gav Ross

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Filed under: Console gaming, Microsoft Games, Xbox 360 Game Reviews, New Xbox 360 Games, Xbox 360, Game Impressions, Kinect reviews Tagged: | Guitar Hero, Kinect, Kinect Adventures, Rayman Raving Rabbids, WarioWare, Xbox 36, Rabbids: Alive & Kicking, Rabbids Alive and Kicking reviews