EyeToy: Kinetic Combat is a more refined version of EyeToy: Kinetic, and focuses on martial arts, but with the basic premise remaining the same: watch yourself on the television punching a bunch of icons and then facing off against a boss. Okay, that’s a lie. Kinetic Combat actually offers an in-depth 16-week training program that's linked to your PlayStation 2’s internal clock and covers everything from warm-ups to warm-downs. This is dubbed "Personal Trainer Mode", and starts off by asking you to fill out your profile by stating your weight and height. You’re then given the option of selecting either a male or female trainer to inspire you.
The program goes through five different themed zones: Dragon, Tiger, Mantis, Phoenix and Chi Kung. The Dragon zone acts as an introduction to the world of Kung Fu, while the others take a more direct approach to specified fields. Tiger zone focuses on building strength, while Mantis is based on agility and balance. Phoenix combines all three zones, and acts as a higher difficulty level on which to test your new skills. Chi Kung deals exclusively with breathing and massage techniques, to compliment the more physical side of the game.
Two, three, kick turn; turn, turn, kick, turn…
The basis of each zone will see you learn a variety of Hung Gar Kung Fu moves, and then implement them in a small series of mini-games, spar against a shadow figure, and ultimately fight against the zone’s symbol (the animal it’s linked to). The mini-games mainly consist of you hitting and dodging objects on the screen with different patterns adding a little variety between each. In one game for example, you are required to hit pods moving about the screen while avoiding glowing lights. In contrast to movement, another game will require you to hit pods in numerical order in which they appear, whilst avoiding their shielding. In essence, they’re really not that much different to the mini-games found in all the other various EyeToy games, but at the same time, if Kinetic Combat didn’t include them, training would become dull and boring.
Shadow sparring is a basic fight against another human shadow figure that uses the zone’s techniques and reveals to you the weaknesses and strengths of it. Finally, the fight against the zone’s symbol is basically a boss fight to end the section of your training and effectively move on to the next level. A nice feature for the mini-games is the option of having a short demo video play to show you the ins and outs of how the mini-game operates.
These moments also happen to be where the EyeToy’s flaws are exposed, and can be taken advantage of by those lazy gamers out there; namely, us. Because both the EyeToy camera and the game itself rely on you to keep your body moving, we literally could just sit in a chair only moving our arms when we had to hit something. It gets better during the fight with the zone animal. The animal doesn’t attack you if it doesn’t sense motion so we cheerfully twitched a few fingers and watched the tiger claw away before exposing itself to our slaps of doom. All while doing this, our trainer complimented us for our “excellent” efforts. However it should be noted, despite our efforts, we couldn’t trick the game into thinking we were actually doing the training exercises and warm-ups correctly.
If you’re not patient enough to wait for the training program, the Freestyle and Quick Play modes offer a more flexible and diverse routine. Freestyle mode allows you to pick and select the different mini-games and bosses of your choice, while Quick Play creates a random routine. If you happen to like the mix, you have the ability to save the selected options so you can quickly select the routine whenever you feel like a quick workout at your leisure.
Hopefully the before and after photos of us playing this game don’t leak out.
On top of this, the game also measures your heart rate by counting down a timer. This requires you to press your fingers against either your wrist or neck to count how many times your pulse beats. After the countdown, you’ll be required to enter the number of beats and the calculations will follow, with the trainer stating whether yours is a good or bad rate.
There are really only two main points in Kinetic Combat which can hinder play. Firstly, because you’re kicking and punching around a lot, you'll need to be in a room that has a lot of space. I personally had to move my PlayStation 2 to two different locations, simply because there was either a chair or table in the way. Admittedly, I nearly kicked my cat across the room during one the training exercises, so there is a big emphasis on playing when other people (or pets) aren't around. Those of you who have smaller TV screens won’t be too happy either, as you have to stand a significant distance away from the EyeToy, so your whole can be viewed on screen. Another major problem is the amount of light needed for the EyeToy to detect your movements. If the room is too dark, you can’t play anything and will be faced with a pause screen; if the room is too light, your hands and feet seem to have invisible attachments. You can tamper with the settings of the game and increase the camera’s sensitivity, but for the most part it doesn’t really help much.
Which brings us to something that annoyed us even more than the two problems touched on above. When you go into an “adjust EyeToy camera” screen, it would be nice if the game would actually allow you to adjust it. When you enter the screen, the game still detects motion and as such, can tell if you’re hitting the “quit” selection. Thinking we just needed to move our body out the way, we proceeded with a second attempt. Little did we know, the EyeToy detected a chair as a moving object despite it being stable like a building cemented into the ground. Developers, if you do include this option in future EyeToy games, please make sure that the only way we can get back to the previous screen is by hitting the start button on the controller. It would be much more effective.
This is making us feel bad about the ten boxes of pizzas we had last week.
Kinetic Combat has an excellent variety of music tracks (70 in total) for you to train along to including breaks, house, hip hop and electro genres. The trainer’s voicework has been well implemented to sound almost like the instructors you see in early morning workout shows. Sound effects are generally on the mark - admittedly, they're nothing special, but do serve as appropriate sounds when you hit the objects well or mess up avoiding something.
Graphically, there’s not a lot that’s impressive with the presentation, but then again, it’s not really needed for this sort of game. The game generally uses simple yet effective methods, such as a calm temple area, as the atmosphere for training. Most of the time you’ll be viewing your own mug anyway, so it’ll come down to how you’ve done your hair and if you’re wearing pretty clothing.
Overall, if you feel you can commit to the fitness program, then Kinetic Combat is one of the best fitness options out there to get, because it offers an in-depth 16 week training schedule. Those of you that are a little unsure, try some of the morning fitness shows on TV and, if you feel inspired, then Kinetic Combat will prove just as beneficial.
I always thought the EyeToy was a decent idea (I have one), but it was never implemented quite well enough.
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