Fighters Uncaged Review

I could easily finish this review up in less than three lines, but protocol dictates that I give you the reader, a proper review of whatever game lands my way. Even if that game makes me want to punch a hole in the wall, which I would easily do if the walls weren’t made of concrete.

With Kinect now on the market and sales climbing steadily, attention is now poised towards which games best utilize this amazing piece of technology. Unfortunately, Fighters Uncaged for Kinect completely disappoints in every conceivable manner, and is easily the weakest Kinect game I’ve seen yet. I’m not sure why Ubisoft would let such a game slip through the cracks, because it’s just that awful.

Fighters Uncaged is a MMA title that pits your against various other fighters in a bid to make a name for yourself. You go up against each fighter and defeat them to earn crowns, which increase your fighting rank and unlock new opponents. Thanks to Kinect, you do away with regular controllers and fight one-on-one with your opponents, punching, kicking, dodging, and swearing your way to victory. While this sounds incredibly good in theory, the execution is so far off that you really won’t be playing this game for more than ten minutes. The fundamental flaw of the game is that Kinect can’t accurately translate your rapid movements into an appropriate flurry of blows. While you would normally bash away at a button to pummel your opponent into the ground, Fighters Uncaged only lets you land one attack at a time, and more than half of the time your opponent simply dodges your attacks. Granted the time between the attacks are short so that it seems that you are attacking your opponent quite viciously, but you tend to feel the lag in between executing a move and watching it being played out on screen.

Essentially the game allows for three kinds of attacks, differentiated by their range. Close range attacks involve headbutts and elbowing your opponent, medium attacks add in punches, uppercuts and knees, and long range attacks include roundhouse kicks and other more powerful moves. Even though you have a decent variety of attacks to pull off, you will most certainly just find yourself punching the air as that seems to be the fastest way to defeat most of the brain-dead AI opponents. And even when you do finally win a match, you often have to defeat that opponent again in order to rack up enough crowns to move to the next rank, which is utterly pointless. The other glaring problem in the game is the omission of any sort of multiplayer option. How can you possibly release a fighting game and not realize the immense joy that exists in beating up your friends? Kinect can certainly handle two players side by side, so why was it never implemented for this game? It’s a feature that might have given the game some sort of multiplayer value, given its incredibly boring single player mode and ridiculously long and pointless training mode. The only one positive point I have to make about the game is that it is a great workout. Your arms will tire, your legs will go sore with all the air-kicks, and your blood will certainly get pumping. It’s too bad that you won’t actually enjoy the game long enough to keep the adrenaline pumping.

The graphics and sound don’t fare too well either – very little is shown of your environment as you battle, as your camera is restricted to close-ups of your character wildly swinging during each fight. The voice acting is also the worst I’ve ever heard, with your character constantly thinking aloud to himself. Phrases like “He dodged my punch!”, “I need to make him look stupid” and “I could have blocked that one” constantly pop in during your fight, and really grate on your nerves.

Fighters Uncaged is by far the weakest game to come out for Kinect to date, and really shouldn’t be shown to anyone who is looking to try out Kinect for the first time. Boring and repetitive fights, no multiplayer, and awful voice acting all mash together to create a truly spectacular train wreck.