The random named tiger

My first game I decided to test is the ridiculously heartwarming sickeningly sweet game Kinectimals. Let me first add my intention of buying this was solely to entertain my 3 year old niece. I swear!

The only easy thing about this game from moment 1 is hitting the close tray button to turn it on. Purchasing one of the collector’s editions with the plush Maltese Tiger I start off trying to scan my little tag to get him in game. This proves extremely difficult as the controls of this game are awful.  Swiping through menus is slow and if you go too fast it freaks out and just stops.  Incidentally, I don’t know what a Maltese Tiger really looks like but my guess is it’s not powder blue like this one in the box, but it’s still cute.

After the debacle of getting in to the game I am staring at this little cub, and he (at least I assume a he) is looking back at me with puppy dog eyes. Now a magical flying little rat shows up to be my guide through this journey.  He proceeds to tell me some story about how the animals all live on this island alone waiting for some guy to come back. Finally we get to a point where I actually do something, name the blue thing.

My initial name tries were rejected until a random name finally stuck, which turns out is meaningless. , which turns out is meaningless. 20 minutes in to the game now and I finally get some kind of interaction with my pet. I will leave out the long boring mini game details but the basics are throwing things that they may or may not bring back, phantom driving things in circles, and using a magnifying glass to find buried stuff that they won’t ever dig up. You can however teach him tricks with hand signals and voice commands, but they will only work during the specific missions. Maybe if I finished all the missions it would have opened up the world more but I just could not suffer through it anymore.

Eventually I tried switching the sensor from the bottom of the tv to the top which made it a little easier to use but, in the end Kinectimals is a great idea that fell way short of what it could have been. Suffering from poor controls and too linear of a storyline, I would recommend renting or maybe even passing on this one all together.

That's how this gamer sees it.
-Pimpnelli