Fighters Uncaged Review

Motion gaming has never been exclusively casual centric, and all the major options have their share of games aimed at the hardcore gamer. For Kinect’s launch, that game comes from Ubisoft, and developer AMA Studios. Fighters Uncaged takes a swing at the core market, but misses terribly and winds up face down in the dirt.

Fighters Uncaged is a motion controlled fighting game for Kinect, where you use your body to beat the living hell out of your opponents. You play as Simon, who has to win an illegal fighting tournament to get his father out of hot water with a kingpin. Unfortunately this game never tells you this, so until I read it in the booklet I just thought I was some a-hole that goes around picking fights with dudes in the middle of parks in broad daylight.

The tutorial, which takes forever, tricks you into thinking the game works, though even in an ideal situation you can see that the controls are barely functional. You can do a series of short and long punches, and kicks, as well as blocks, dodges and headbutts. When the fights actually start, pulling off moves becomes a series of desperate flails, trying to get the game to recognize your actions. The types of moves you can do are limited based on where your opponent is. So the game often requires very specific moves to be pulled off in order to land hits. But the motion controls are so bad that I could only pull off the right moves half the time.