Powerup Heroes Review
Powerup Heroes is a new Kinect game for Xbox 360. Its a fighting game from Ubisoft, the same publisher that brought us the Kinect game Fighters: Uncaged last year. It did not review well. As a completely unrelated second try at the fighting genre, Powerup Heroes takes a more traditional fighting game approach.
By incorporating Xbox 360 avatars and Kinect, Powerup Heroes approximates a one on one battle between you and a friend if both of you had crazy alien superpowers. On paper, Powerup Heroes sounds like a compelling use of the Kinect sensor or at the very least fantastic party fodder. On the surface, it pulls off both of these things superbly.
Powerup Heroes has the potential to be a fantastic game. Get the right people in a room with the right attitude about looking like a clown, throw in a couple six packs and fun will be had, I promise. However, beyond “dumb party game” its really hard to recommend this to anyone over the age of 13. Saying the story is shallow, is really an over statement and the fighting mechanics pale in comparison to that of a real fighter.
During a fight, the player’s powersuit wearing avatars are facing each other and are awaiting input from the Kinect sensor. Each powersuit has 3 distinct special moves, basic punch and kick moves and the ability to dodge. The avatars on screen are not mapped one to one to the players’ bodies, but certain gestures cause certain attacks to trigger. This turns the whole experience into an elaborate fast-paced game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Each player has access to 2 of the suits during each fight with the ability to toggle between them mapped to an arm gesture. The special moves and suits have different attack stats. Some of them take off more energy while others stun the opponent longer. Chaining these attacks together can leave your opponent vulnerable during combos and can result in rapidly shrinking life bars. Linking 2-3 attacks together between your 2 power suits is extremely satisfying when it works.
Powerup Heroes’ biggest strength “The Power of Kinect” also turns out to be its biggest downfall. Take the single player mode for example. The campaign starts out pretty easy and the moves you must do in front of Kinect to register attacks work well. Since the game is not too frantic and the enemies are rather dumb, the Kinect senor works like a hero. Despite built-in timing lag, the sensor responds well, your moves are executed quickly and runs at about the pace you would expect out of a Kinect game. As you get closer to the end of the single player mode, the flaws in the sensitivity of Kinect become more and more obvious.
The biggest culprit of this is the final boss. To beat the final boss, you must chain several moves together to defeat him, but when doing so Kinect can’t decide which gestures in which to give priority. To dodge the player must lean left or right, but many of the gestures needed to attack naturally cause the player to lean a little bit. This makes the character cancel their attack mid execution and dodge out of the way. Since the powers have a recharge period after each use and a cancelled power counts as a used power, your entire strategy can busted because Kinect gave your slight lean priority over your obvious arm swing.
This also happens a lot on the projectile punch. To shoot an attack cancelling projectile, the player has to punch, but some of the power suits have powers whose gestures are similar to a punch. If you are frantically trying to dodge and counter the final bosses moves, Kinect WILL misinterpret your gestures giving the boss opportunity to enter his 1/2 life bar draining combo…that can’t be dodged or escaped.
No game should have a final boss that is exponentially harder than previous bosses. I was able to clear each fighter in the game in about 1-4 attempts. Some put up more of a challenge than others, but all of them were reasonable. Maliganance X, the final fighter in Powerup Heroes is at least 10 times harder than them all. I have tired at least 50 times to beat him spanning 3 different play sessions with no luck. I can’t even win one round. I’ve used different strategies, and even tried to spam him with moves that the internet suggested and still haven’t even come close.
The difficulty disparity is un-called-for, and shows a serious lack of play testing, not to mention, its ill advised game design. The single player mode in Powerup Heroes should not show the faults of the gesture system, its should show the strength of it. Making the final boss nearly unbeatable, mostly because the Kinect controls can’t keep up with how fast you need to move to beat him, breaks the entire experience, single and multilayer. This boss alone exposes the cracks in the hardware and software and once you see those cracks, the experience is ruined.
Don’t let that turn you off though, Powerup Heroes has alot of good attributes and will probably end up being alot of people’s favorite Kinect game (by “people” I mean children).
Verdict: If anyone can come to my house and beat this game they can leave with my copy of it free of charge. I really want those achievements.
