Kinect Star Wars Review

A mediocre game that fails to deliver on what it sets out to do, and what many fans were hoping for

Posted by Christian Sorrell on April 22, 2012 - 11:54pm EST

The most annoying aspects of Star Wars Kinect come with its visual glitches and inability to properly recognize the player and tie the game to their account (including achievements). The game’s visual glitches include a number of occasional camera issues, mostly during cutscenes, which will have you looking through the bottom of the level or staring straight at a wall for several seconds. While I have never personally experienced this problem with any other game, Star Wars Kinect seemed entirely unable to recognize me and log into my profile automatically. I was required to pause the game at the beginning of each level, menu, or event section of a level at times and then manually log into my account in order to properly receive things like achievements, be listed on leaderboards, etc. This led to me missing out on a number of achievements I should have received as well as properly being integrated into the game’s leaderboards, records, and leveling systems.

Star Wars Kinect isn’t a horrific game and I’m sure that the franchise has had considerably more terrible games in the past. That said, it also isn’t a good game by any stretch of the imagination. As such, I came off feeling entirely indifferent to it overall, but certainly not wanting to participate in its overly-long and limb-tiring game modes that require little more from me than simply quivering in place and moving my feet a bit. Star Wars Kinect’s biggest issue though is the fact that it fails to properly replicate any of the memorable moments from any of the films, instead deciding to create new characters and events which only feature a small number of franchise characters and, even then, only in cutscenes. As a romp through the franchise similar to Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, Star Wars Kinect could have been gimmicky fun, but as something this generic and forgettable, it fails to be much of anything at all.