Review: Kinect Star Wars squanders promise with “Simon Says” gameplay

When Microsoft showed off its vision for the future of its Kinect 3D motion-sensing camera at last year’s E3 press conference, the centerpiece of the staged presentation was a player pantomiming the motions of a Jedi Knight and seeing his lightsaber-wielding avatar mimic them on the massive screen in front of him. It was a moment full of promise, and one that probably crystallized many audience members’ childhood dreams of actually being a Jedi, or at least coming as close as technology would allow.

Those dreams are likely to shatter into pieces, though, once people actually play the incredibly unimaginatively titled Kinect Star Wars, which squanders its potential to really make players feel like a Jedi through an overly restrictive and narrow design.

I’ll admit, I got a little chill up my spine the first time I reached out my hand to lift up a virtual lightsaber from a table in front of my avatar, and it was thrilling watching my first few tentative real-world sword swings mimicked relatively accurately on screen. But this sense of wonder quickly gave way to fatigue once the training portion transitioned to an actual game that would have trouble passing muster as a button-mashing brawler in the late ’80s.

The real problem with Kinect Star Wars is that most of the game feels specifically designed to show off one (and only one) specific control function. Here’s the part where you duck to avoid the low hanging tree branch. Here’s the part where you slowly lift your arms to lift an inconvenient tree stump off of an ally. Here’s the part where you hold your hand in front of you to deflect incoming missiles for a minute or so. Here’s the part where you stand in place waving your arm in a figure-eight for 15 seconds to block a barrage of incoming blaster fire… yet again.

These discrete events don’t flow together very naturally, and each one is usually accompanied by a voice-over explicitly telling you what to do, a little on-screen hologram illustrating what motion to make, or both. The net effect is a game that makes you feel less like an autonomous, badass Jedi and more like a participant in a really simple game of Simon Says.

Perhaps nothing highlights this problem more than the occasional lightsaber duels you have with major enemies in the game. Rather than the improvised, offensive and defensive give-and-take of a good fighting games, these duels awkwardly divide the battle into two distinct sections: a “blocking only” section where you move your hand in four cardinal directions to deflect some ridiculously telegraphed attacks, and an “attack only” section where you flail your arm wildly to get in as many lightsaber pokes as possible (using proper sword-wielding form is of little to no importance in the heat of battle). It’s like the world’s slowest, most awkward version of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, only without the ethnic stereotypes.

The game does occasionally get out of its own way, letting you use a variety of powers somewhat freely in battles with large waves of droids and aliens. There were rare moments where I actually managed to lose myself in the flow of these battles, dodging incoming fire with a quick lean to one side before jumping in place to send my Jedi Knight high into the air, then slashing my arm down to perform a devastating behind-the-back strike before quickly reaching out my hand to pick up and fling a nearby enemy to the side. But even at its most thrilling, the general awkwardness of the real-world controls slows the game’s pace down immensely, leading to battles that tend to look overly choreographed and staged.

And whenever the game was threatening to get exciting, the sense of flow would be interrupted by the game taking control of my character for yet another awkwardly acted cut scene, or to force my character to jog slowly down a corridor to the next enemy encounter. You’d think that a game that entrusts you with control of a freaking lightsaber would also trust you to navigate the world on your own, but Kinect Star Wars is constantly pushing you forward down one narrow path, making the detailed environments feel like so much window dressing. And that path forward seems to always go through more of the same simple timing challenges and generic enemies that you’ve battled many times before. Yet you’ll battle them again, without actually having to evolve your underlying strategy or change up your repertoire of a few repetitive motions, the body-flailing equivalent of button mashing.