It's Morphing Time With Power Rangers Samurai Kinect - Preview
by Daniel Share-Strom , posted on 09 June 2012 / 3,453 Views
I expected many things to happen at E3. Living out my childhood dream of becoming the red ranger was not one of them. As you can probably imagine from the title alone, Power Rangers Kinect is certainly not shaping up to be a triple-A game. Heck, it’s not even shaping up to be a single-A game. Even so, if you can suspend your disbelief and overlook the fact that the Kinect often has great trouble reading your motions, it’s easy to pretend you’ve jumped into the Power Rangers universe and have an exciting time.
Three game modes were on offer, which naturally meant that I played three game modes. The first, Ranger Battle, let me select a ranger and go to town on a bunch of Moogers. Swiping horizontally or vertically with my right hand swung his huge sword, while I could theoretically punch with the left. ‘Theoretically,’ because I could not successfully perform this action even once, and it was the same deal with kicking. Luckily, the sword was more than enough to get through everything. Awkwardly, movement is accomplished by attacking — performing an attack makes you walk toward the nearest enemy. This made it difficult when trying to attack the one behind it that was gearing up to strike. Eventually, I got to a boss that required a fair bit of strategy and dexterity to beat. In a manner reminiscent of Punch-Out, I had to lean left or right, jump, or duck in order to avoid swings of his tail before I was allowed to hit him with a combo. To finish him off, I had to hold my arms in a certain position to perform a special attack, but it took at least five minutes to do this properly; the rep even admitted that I was doing it right and the Kinect simply was not reading it how it should have. The second gametype played similarly to that fight, but put me, first-person, in the cockpit of the MegaZord.
The third gametype was a little different — Ranger Training. Ever wanted to play Simon Says with the Power Rangers? Well, first off, go see a therapist. Second, meh. At the beginning, one ranger performed an action (like a punch with the right fist) which I had to then copy. Each successive step increased the number of moves I had to do without messing up. Does Kinect really need another game where you simply follow the movements of an onscreen character?
So, at best, Power Rangers Kinect is a game that you cannot control with consistency, and at worst it’s an unnecessary use of the Power Rangers brand. The graphics in the desert environments I saw were bland, and characters did not animate fluidly. I wouldn’t exactly put it in the running for our Best of E3 awards. That said, if you liked Power Rangers as a kid, you may find a decent nostalgia trip here, and two-player support means you can pass the obsession on to your kids when the game launches ‘soon’.
