Up until this point, the Kinect has been really viewed as a dynamic for family and casual gamers, with titles such as Dance Central, Kinectimals and Kinect Sports attracting the masses. Several new titles have added to that list, including Fruit Ninja Kinect and Body and Brain Connection. But the question is, when would there by a Kinect game that really catered to the hardcore crowd – and not something on a supplementary basis, like Ghost Recon: Future Soldier and Mass Effect 3? Well, wonder no longer, as Sega has introduced an interesting survival horror game that will put your Kinect skills to the test when it comes to ripping apart undead monsters and other foul beasts. The Kinect required Xbox 360 game Rise of Nightmares is a variant of the company’s House of the Dead games, even though it’s not directly affiliated. You’ll spend a good deal of time navigating your way through a haunted castle, dispatching members of the undead and a few nasty bosses as you try to save your wife Kate – and a few other innocent folks – from a fate worse than death, handed down by an evil mad scientist.
When the game begins, you get your start in the eyes of another couple, getting a hang of the combat and what you need to do to get around. For the most part, Sega has conceptualized this admirably, though the execution isn’t exactly the greatest. To walk forward, you simply put your foot in front of you, shifting it even further out if you wish to go faster. When it comes to looking around, Rise of Nightmares tracks your movement in real time, so if you turn left, so does your in-game character. Handling inventory and interacting with items is a matter of waving your hand over the available object and performing either a quick grab or another motion, depending on the object. Doors, for instance, you swing open, while bugs are swatted away using quick slap motions on each arm. As for the combat, it’s a matter of putting up your fists and then swinging away with whatever object is in your hand. You’ll run across all sorts of helpful tools in Rise of Nightmares, and the deeper you get, the more elaborate they become, and the more gruesome an effect they leave behind.
Chopping off heads is pretty commonplace in Rise of Nightmares, and sometimes you can get even worse than that, depending on how you use your imagination. Boss battles consist of hacking someone to pieces while occasionally side-stepping them in real-time combat (by stepping to the left or right) and getting the jump on them. So how do the Kinect controls work overall? Well, like we said, there are issues when it comes to some movements, and the fact that the best way to get around is by performing the auto-walk, rather than manually maneuvering around, may leave your right arm too tired to perform in combat. But otherwise, we’re quite impressed with how well the Kinect controls worked in Rise of Nightmares. The combat itself, while repetitive is sloppy fun, as you lop off heads and kick someone back into the middle of next week – or maybe even an elaborate trap. Still, more could’ve been done with walking. What trouble would it have been for Sega to include some motion tracking for walking in place? Trying to stick your foot out while holding up arms and other limbs may be confusing for lesser players, forcing them to stick with the auto-walk.
This feature review continues on the next page, please click Page 2 below to read our final thoughts on SEGA's Rise of Nightmares for the Kinect.
