Body-Tracking Multi-Sports Video Game Review: Kinect Sports: Season Two

Kinect Sports brought the Xbox 360 its own take on the popular Wii Sports title for its competitor, the Wii. However, with a lack of the most popular games from that title, it didn't shine quite as brightly.

That changed when Microsoft tasked Rare with making a sequel for the body-tracking Kinect camera, this time with help from developer BigPark.

Kinect Sports: Season Two contains more sports including gridiron football, skiing, and darts. This time around, it finally features some of the most popular games from Microsoft's competitor Nintendo, including tennis, golf, and baseball.

The sequel manages to get around one of the main problems of the Kinect, which makes it need a lot of room to get full-body tracking. Season Two's use of upper body sports has more going for it for people, like me, who only have enough room to get partial body tracking. 

This game, by far, gets the use out of the two games by my family. Darts is a favorite of my mother's. She often asks to play it because it is fun, intuitive, and easy to use with the Kinect camera. I, personally, enjoy the baseball minigame. Like darts, it works great with the Kinect camera. All of these work much better than season one as the camera isn't as finicky due to the fact the entire camera body tracking isn't needed. You can toss around the pigskin, throw darts, and hit baseballs and tennis balls with ease. Even golf and skiing work with just half a body detected, although these two can be more finicky than the others, especially in the case of skiing.

This game still contains the major drawback of the Kinect, however, as that's purely a hardware issue. The Kinect camera has trouble detecting dark colors, so make sure you don't have on a dark outfit so that the sensor has the best chance to detect your body. Unfortunately, this trouble with dark colors also is seen with hair and even skin color. I have natural jet-black hair, and I have played many Kinect games with my hair completely cut off. People with dark skin tones have reported even worse issues, with Kinect not detecting them or cutting off entire body parts.

Kinect Sports: Season Two is a drastic improvement over the predecessor. It solves some of the problems the Kinect has with a small living room space by having games that need only partial body detection. Gridiron football, darts, and baseball work great. Even skiing and golf work with just partial body detection, although these might need more adjustment than the others. The hardware issues with problems detecting dark colors are still a problem for people with jet-black hair and even worse for people with dark skin tones. However, Kinect Sports: Season Two managed to better play to Kinect's strengths with a game that is very satisfying to play.

Final Verdict:
4 out of 5