UPDATE: Our EA Sports Active 2 review roundup is live. Go check it out!
EA Sports Active 2 follows on from where its lean prequel started, with yet another exercise title to get you gaming fit. Now, with the impending launch of Microsoft Kinect and its full body motion controls, exercise games on the console could potentially change forever. We recently grabbed a chance to give it a try using Kinect. EA promises it will deliver “true results.” Do we believe them? Find out in our EA Sports Active 2 for Kinect review first impressions.
Whether you’re into exercise and fitness or not it’s fair to say that some exercise titles can feel a little hit and miss. Wii Fit, the most well known of these, while effective at the basics isn’t exactly the type of title you’d use to get yourself fit, so to speak. Any serious cardio on that balance board would break it.
We got the chance this week to not only see EA Sports Active 2 in action, but play it ourselves using Microsoft Kinect. Gerard Recio, EA Sports Active Associate Producer and fitness advisor on EA Sports Active 2 told us it will offer “a great workout to make you sweat and deliver true results.”
Besides Microsoft Kinect the only extra peripheral you’ll need, to get the most out of EA Sports Active 2 is a heart rate monitor to discover how hard you’re working and track your performance over time. Combined with Microsoft Kinect EA Sports Active 2 does its best to make working out fun while working your body using proper exercise routines. Think of it like secretly putting medicine in your moggie’s food bowl. You’ll be working out without even thinking about it. Until you’re out of breath that is. We were genuinely impressed with the potential of Kinect here.
A Mountain Biking mode has you assuming the squat position and timing squat jumps as you approach bumps, and then running on the spot to get moving again when faced with steep hills. Attach the heart rate monitor and you can see your heart rate go through different phases during the routine.
Foot fires was more basic, but perhaps even more tiring. The aim is to move your legs as fast as possible while in a squat position, the kind of workout professional footballers might use as part of their workout routine. Fitness trail has you simply running on the spot in a race to the finish.
Typical complaints about some exercise games is that exercise routines still aren’t fun. You just do as you’re told. EA Sports Active 2 has those one-on-one virtual routines, but for those wanting to liven up their exercise routines, they’re easily combined with less conventional sweat-inducing activities.
Check out our best Kinect games Top 5 now!
Dodgeball was the first of these we played. You stand facing a large wall with holes dotted all over. Balls shoot out from each hole. Your job is to dodge as many as you can by jumping, ducking, starjumping and any which way you can. It’s extremely rapid, and if you needed any evidence that Kinect can cope with fast body movements, this is it. The action is fast and unrelenting, which from a fitness viewpoint really does make your skin pour.
Football fans will find plenty to enjoy in the form of goalkeeping and striking mini-games. Your job is to stop as many balls getting kicked past you by the CPU-controlled players. Kinect does a commendable job of keeping up with your body movements here no matter how nimble you are. Just as well, because Goalkeeper has you jumping about just as much as Dodgeball. Sometimes just sticking a leg out, or limply raising a hand in the air is enough. But it’s when you have to move from one side of the goal to the opposite that things get really strenuous, and a true indicator of the energy needed to finish each workout.
Football Striker is less knackering, but still a worthwhile exercise to stretch your legs. This time you face the goal and shoot at the allocated targets, two in the top and bottom corners and two in the lower and upper centre of the goal. A CPU character passes the ball to you, and you must hit the targets. A direct hit makes the target vanish, and the aim is to make each disappear. You really have to put some welly into your kicks here. Connect limply and the ball will trickle shamefully for about a yard.
Away from the games the core features and sections housed on the menu include programs for peeping at different routines, and a My Workouts section letting you see what you’ve done, and your customised workouts, while there’s an online store we’re told will keep workouts fresh and exciting. What these will comprise, we weren’t told specifically, but in future you could expect to see for sale workouts for individual body parts, or ones to get you looking ready for the beach.
EA, the publisher and developer claims that EA Sports Active 2 will deliver actual results you’ll be able to see. While we’ve yet to play it long enough to find out for ourselves if that’s true, it really does make you work up a sweat. The heart monitor doesn’t lie. Kinect may have just cornered a rather lucrative niche.
Out 16 November | £TBC | EA Sports Active 2
