If you’re a
Kinect owner waiting for a sports game to compete with Kinect Sports, keep waiting.
The only thing this game competes with is your patience.
And sanity.
It’s Big League Sports.
On the surface, this looks like another compilation of condensed sports games.
There are six sports in Big League Sports, so you might say, “Hey, that’s fun.
That’s the same amount as Kinect Sports.
This must be just as good.”
Only it’s not as good.
In fact, this game makes Kinect Sports look like a motion-controlled War and Peace.
So there are technically six sports here, but only two remotely resemble the sports
they’re claiming to represent.
Baseball and golf offer short versions of the sports, much like the Wii Sports games
in structure.
But the other four are just minigames, emphasis on mini.
They literally last a minute or so, and what’s worse...they’re all the same.
Here’s how they work.
You run or skate forward, and at you encounter defenders, you have to do situational movements.
That’s it.
For all four.
So in basketball, you dribble up to a defender, and then you move.
In hockey, you skate up to a defender, and then you hit them.
In football and soccer, you run up to some guy and juke him.
You do these things a few times in a row, and then you win.
I’m not kidding.
Look, that’s it.
I won.
I guess you could argue there is a bit of depth, since successfully performing those
moves in combination puts you in some kind of pro mode, but all that does is remove the
onscreen icons that show you how to do the moves.
And really, if that is deep, so are puddles.
So you have the main games, which essentially are the same simple minigame with different
aesthetics, but you also have two additional minigames per sport.
In soccer, you get to block shots and score goals.
The funny thing is these are supposed to be short games based on specific sports skills,
but they end up being about the same length as the main games.
In fact, I don’t even want to talk about those four anymore.
It just puts me in this confused state in which I question my own existence.
But at least there are the other two, right?
You know, baseball and golf?
The full, Wii Sports-like games?
Yeah, turns out the only good thing about those is that they’re longer, but that—in
fact—ends up being a bad thing because they’re actually worse than the short ones.
Or short one.
Baseball struggles with inconsistent motion control that seems totally arbitrary in its
translation of your movements.
I swung the same every time, and it was like the game just decided on its own where it
wanted my hits to go.
And pitching has an even more random feel.
It fact, I gave up several runs in a row without getting a single out in the first inning...but
then all of a sudden, with the same motions, I struck out the next three batters to end
the inning.
I felt like a mercy rule went into effect or something.
And somehow, golf is even worse.
It’s based on the whole “swing when the arrow is pointed the way you want” thing.
Real accurate and realistic stuff.
Fortunately, there’s only three holes...and this is one of the long games.
To its credit, this version of Big League Sports is much better than the Wii version,
which is one of the worst games of all-time.
This one isn’t that bad.
But it’s not that good, either.