With the Kinect out on the market for over a month now, there are plenty of potentially good titles to choose from, including Kinect Sports and Dance Central. Unfortunately, the crappy games almost seem to be coming out on a 1-to-1 ratio with the great ones, and among them is Konami’s Adrenalin Misfits, a game that relies more on its extreme sports theme than coherent gameplay.
Like Sonic Free Riders before it, Adrenalin Misfits has serious control problems. You’ll play the game coasting down the mountain, leaning left and right to guide yourself around turns while occasionally jumping and completing tricks. I use the word “occasionally” very carefully, because that’s how often you’ll be successful in executing them. The game simply doesn’t react as well as it should, resulting in numerous wall crashes, tricks that aren’t pulled off, and a sense of frustration that’s simply unshakable.
What’s more, the game also features power-ups, which you use by lifting your foot off of the ground and slamming it down. Now, steering is enough of a problem as it is without you needing to perform a balancing act, but the power-ups in general don’t really do much. You’d expect them to affect your opponents or improve your race more than they do. It’s almost as if Konami installed them for show.
Along with a racing circuit mode, Adrenalin Misfits features a number of bonus challenges, including balloon collecting, trick scoring and running through slalom gates. If the game had accurate controls, these would actually be fun. But it doesn’t, so they aren’t.
The only highlight here is with the split-screen multiplayer. You and a friend will screw up equally, but there’s something moderately enjoyable about competing in a versus race. Perhaps it’s the involvement of a second player rather than lamely driven AI opponents that make it appealing.
Unfortunately, the presentation brings Misfits back down to intolerable levels. Though the wide-open stage design gives you plenty of room to roam, the in-game characters, based on animals, are a little too “extreme” for its own good. For crying out loud, the leader is a wolf named Sabre. The audio is no better, thanks to forgettable music and an overuse of such “extreme” terms as “dude” and “gnarly”. It’s almost like we’re in Ninja Turtles territory again.
Even if you’re a fan of snowboarding games, you’ll struggle with almost everything that Adrenalin Misfits has to offer. Even the inclusion of a likable multiplayer mode can’t keep this game from being a grind.
