Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012

Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012Fitness Evolved 2012 really shows off the Kinect technology. It "scans" your body at the start to project a real-time model of yourself into the game. I was eating a bowl of ice cream at the start and I could see my avatar holding the bowl of ice cream in the game. It doesn't scan/render my head/hair correctly though and I don't have a funky hairdo. The tracking is nearly accurate all the time, I only had a few instances where it didn't seem to register my movements correctly in Zen/Yoga and brick breaking.There are a lot of exercises in this game, some are broken down by difficulty and stages. There's even a personalized fitness program that recommends exercises based on what you want to achieve. You don't have to follow it, and can tailor it however you desire.The running and jump rope games seemed interesting at first, but they're essentially games that require you to run in place (lift knees higher for more speed) or jump in place (coordinate with the footprints on the screen). The stomp it had an interesting premise but I had to be really coordinated and the calorie burn rate was minimal.My favorite events are balancing a platform with boxes falling down (strengthens core muscles), brick/wall breaking, cardio kickboxing, and Zen energy. Cardio kickboxing starts off slow but it builds you up quickly and the full-speed exercises are a lot of fun. I was definitely sweating big time after each event and have felt improvements in my core muscles, legs, and arms. The Zen Energy combines Yoga with Tai Chi. The really great part about Fitness Evolved 2012 is the computer trainer. She will make suggestions in real-time and provide audio/visual cues on what to do next. Games like Just Dance 4 and Zumba Fitness Core may provide visual cues but it's not always that useful. Fitness Evolved 2012 is not just about matching the movements, but doing the movements correctly with assistance and practice, as well as using calories as a performance metric.The core, abs, and other focused training events work exceptionally well. The crunches and other ab work that requires you to lie down on the floor somehow track accurately in Kinect. Although I do have a 8 foot space from the Kinect in my living room.There's quite a few pay-to-play DLC in this game, including one that requires you to buy a Gatorade G02 bottle to scan in order to unlock. I won't be buying any of the DLC or the Gatorade because the existing events are fine as-is. I didn't see anything that made me want to go out and spend Microsoft points or money to purchase.Remember to load the Kinect Playfit app for Xbox so you can get more achievements by burning calories, as Fitness Evolved 2012 is a compatible game.Overall: 5/5 stars, my favorite fitness game for Kinect with many fun and useful training exercises. Cardio kickboxing and Zen Energy are my favorites!

I'm revising my original review.The game itself? Pretty fun. The games are enjoyable, the feedback is useful, the motion control is pretty accurate. My sole complaint in that regard is that it doesn't really give you much training, basically just throwing you into it and assuming you'll pick it up. That makes the first several iterations of trying a lot of the exercises very frustrating. Since I could do them if I knew how. If it had a training mode to drop into (or maybe there is one that I just overlooked), I'd have no complaints.The feedback is good (though a bit condescending, since the system'll pop up alerts and ask if I want to take a break if I slow down. Ha), the games are fun,a nd it's definitely tiring. It's very nice not having to swing around a wiimote like I did with the wii active, and I'm looking forward to using my free weights instead of resistance bands. So far I've just done the cardio exercises.I revised the review because this game was consistently overheating my xbox. It's an elite model, about 3.5 years old. After playing this game for a little while, I got 2 red rings (ram overheating), and just have not been able to recover the system since then. It'll limp along marginally well, but if I popped in Your Shape Fitness, it'd overheat and shut down just a few minutes into the workout. I had no problems at all before trying this game.So I went and picked up a new xbox and have now been playing the game on the new system for several hours w/o any issues at all. So while this game does seem to stress your system, it's plausible that my console was just old enough that it merely pushed it over the edge, as opposed to anything else. Playing it on the new slim shows absolutely no issues whatsoever. I'm not going to blame ubisoft for that.Definitely recommended.