Fighter Within

Better than Fighters Uncaged, but that wasn’t too hard. Fighter Within works, and that’s the only positive thing to say about it. For £50, you’re best off paying for a session of S&M with your local masochist. It’d last longer.

Fighter Within is a lazy tech demo with a poor story, unimpressive fighting engine, and a forgettable cast. Maybe one day we’ll have a cool Kinect fighting game, where everyone at EVO is flailing around with some semblance of strategic value. But this is not that day.

Aside from the very basics of punching and kicking, nothing in The Fighter Within works well, and very little works at all. It's gesture recognition is abysmal, its fighting is shallow, and it wastes too much time trying to clumsily tell a silly, unnecessary story. In short, it's everything Microsoft promised Kinect 2.0 wouldn't be.

They made a sequel?

Everything you'd expect it to be and less.

I’ve had a chance to review many games over the years that were varying shades of broken. I’ve encountered countless freezes, buggy updates, and mindless AI. As unforgivably awful as some of these games have been, at least I can say that I’ve always been able to accurately make menu selections in them. Your greatest opponent in Fighter Within is the Kinect motion recognition, which makes a task as simple as choosing “continue” or “quit” an ordeal.

You can definitely still win matches using the more basic gestures but it simply gets extremely repetitive and eventually unenjoyable. Multiplayer is the only redeeming part of the game. It’s still bad, but the fact that you’re enjoying how bad it is with somebody else makes it hilariously fun. You never know what to expect and it makes the game almost enjoyable for a brief amount of time.