Fighter Within

This is a Kinect-only brawler that offers players a chance to pummel their opponents into submission with their bare hands, in theory at least. The reality, however, is far less appealing than the premise.

It's painfully obvious that {Fighter Within} isn't going to be very good before you've even thrown your first punch in the game. The menu system is one of the very worst we have ever encountered. It's imprecise, frustrating and finicky. You have to hover over and then hit the various tiles to select a desired action, but sometimes it doesn't work at all, other times it registers your input but nothing happens, and occasionally you'll hit the wrong option by accident and have to go back through more frustrating menu screens. It's a mess, and an ominous sign that everything here doesn't work as it should.

Once past the infuriating menu system, you need to learn the game's systems. This is done via the Initiation mode, which doubles up as the single-player campaign. You only play it with one character, and scrap through a series of opponents, learning the ropes as you go. Once completed there's an Arcade mode that offers a simpler, more streamlined experience, and you can play that as any of the other characters from the roster.

The roster itself is of a reasonable size, but the fact is that most of the fighters play almost identically, so rather than adapting to new and exciting fighting styles, you're basically just choosing a different skin and a couple of unique animations for each play through. To make matters worse, the assembled line-up represents a who's who of insulting stereotypes. There's a hairy-shouldered tartan-wearing Scot, a headphone-wearing DJ, a tattooed ninja, a busty bikini-clad Russian, a similarly scantily-robed voodoo-priestess, and a waistcoat-wearing brit with big hair. It's so unimaginative it hurts.

You're led through the Initiation mode by Matt Gilford, the most spectacularly generic fighter of all time. He starts off cocky and full of irritating arrogance, and by the end he is bestowed with wisdom beyond his years. Story, if you can call it that, is delivered via voice-over between fights. They haven't even stretched to cutscenes. The script that delivers the plot is utterly woeful, full of cliches and badly written dialogue. It starts off as a fairly run-of-the-mill story, but ends up flirting with fantasy and Genghis Khan. It's not a genre renowned for advanced storytelling technique, but this represents a new low as far as we're concerned.

None of this would really matter though, if the fighting was up to scratch. It's not. In fact, it's pretty dire. There's basic punches and kicks, counter attacks, the odd special or throw, and moves that are activated by building up your 'Ki' levels in the midst of battle and assuming a special pose. The Kinect manages to pick up the basic punch and kick moves, just about, but beyond that it can be frustratingly fickle about which movements it registers and which is doesn't. Seemingly identical actions will do nothing one minute, and connect perfectly the next, and all the while you'll be scratching your head wondering exactly what it was that you did that was different. Low blows are sometimes confused as sweeping kicks, and throws hardly ever seem to work because Kinect regularly interprets these gestures as punches.

String together a quick flurry of blows and it automatically turns into a combo, but you can't link combos together into a meaningful assault. There's a stick on the floor of each arena that can be picked up and used to whack your opponent around the head with, but the gesture for grabbing the weapon failed to register more times than not. There's even a pole in each stage that can be used in combat, with well-timed hops sending your character swinging around them like deadly strippers with flying kicks and jump attacks.

If you're having trouble timing your counters and special moves, you can activate a shadow that appears on screen (slightly behind the action) and indicates the right moment to execute certain context-specific moves, but variable success rates when utilising these on-screen prompts makes following instructions more of a risk than just doing your own thing. If you're still having problems, on the standard difficulty setting, a genuine tactic is just to wave your hands and legs violently in some kind of freestyle hokey-cokey - the physical equivalent of blindly mashing buttons. Sad to say that from time to time it actually works.

There are other tactics that pretty much guarantee success. When discovered they simultaneously save and ruin the game. They save the game because you'll be able to proceed without too much stress, but they ruin it because you'll have no need to persevere with the other moves and mix up your play. Sticking both arms up in the air in a 'W' shape charges your 'Ki' meter. There's three stages of charge, the first being a powerful kick attack, the second is also powerful and allows you to swap positions with your enemy (helpful if you're hovering perilously near the edge of the ring), the third is an even more potent attack that your enemy has the chance to cancel halfway through if they can pump air more effectively than you in the resultant game of QTE pat-a-cake. We found that, on regular difficulty at least, your opponents can't do enough damage in the time it takes to charge up your 'Ki' to the first attack level, and so spamming them with that one move is enough to ensure victory. It's only on the hardest difficulty setting that you have to rethink this tactic.

This simple route to victory gets boring quickly, but the alternative is frustrating controls that don't always translate actions accurately on the screen, so whenever we hit a brick wall we found ourselves falling back on this tried and tested 'get out of jail free card'. As we played more we got better at reading the signals on screen, and varying up our attacks became possible, but the Kinect's interpretation of our gestures never translated into genuine fluency in-game. A few beats always went missing, and in a genre where accuracy is king, that's a big problem.

Beyond the single-player campaigns (Initiation and Arcade) there's a training mode that allows you to pick any fighter and play against any other (adjusting defensive and offensive variables as you see fit) in a practice arena, and a Duel mode that effectively offers the exact same thing, except for without the options and you can choose which arena to fight in. These modes are the sum total of {Fighter Within}'s single player repertoire. There's also a multiplayer mode, which is a straight-up duel between two players, standing side-by-side, flailing limbs in tandem with all the grace of a newborn giraffe.

Visually it's decent. The fighters are all hugely detailed, there's no rough edges, and the different animations are easy on the eye (even if there aren't that many of them). Sweat beads on the skin of fighters, and faces visibly bloody up during bouts. The arenas that you fight in are also nicely done, with plenty of variety to the different backgrounds, and scenery inside the rings that gets trampled underfoot, adding to the chaos and spectacle of battle. It certainly looks like a next-gen game.

But it doesn't matter how pretty it is when the rest of the package is lacking in every other conceivable department. Viewed as an exercise tool it's not terrible, and certainly more fun than some of the mini-games you'll get in something like {Your Shape: Fitness Evolved}. Flapping your hands around, getting up off the sofa and swinging your arms and legs in different directions, especially in the company of others, can be fun. However, if you consider it in its intended form, that of a fighting game, it's horribly lacking (much like {Fighters Uncaged}, which tried the same trick back on the original Kinect). There's not enough accuracy in the moves, there's not enough variation in the characters, and the only compelling part of the game is the novelty of the Kinect controls, and they don't work very well. We really can't recommend you pick this one up. If you want to punch people in the face on your Xbox One, play {Killer Instinct} instead, not only is it much cheaper, it's also the superior fighting game.