Does the game live up to the TV show?

Activision have decided that Wipeout is such a great TV show that it deserves its own game. I agree that on paper the game show would make a great Kinect game, but can they translate that well enough into a video game. No. Simply put, this game is terrible. I’m not going to sugar coat anything, it is the poorest made Kinect game we have played so far.

Single Player

Wipeout is broken down into stages based on difficulty. You play through the easy rounds, to unlock medium, beat medium to unlock hard and then you beat the game. The game plays out just like the show, as you run through the qualifier obstacle course, then you compete in the eliminator round to get to the final zone where the fastest person wins. It does a good job at staying true to the show even including the two John hosts and Jill the interview girl.

All of your favorite games are here as well. From Big Balls, to Sucker Punch and Smackwall Sweeper. They are hilarious to watch on the show, who doesn’t love watching someone bounce off those huge balls?

It never gets old.

The problem is that the game just does not work. It has the poorest motion tracking yet in a kinect game. It tells you to crouch and you do, then while you are crouching, your avatar will just stand up and get knocked off and you have to try again. Or you jump and it doesn’t jump and you get knocked off and you try again, along the way increasing your qualifying time, making it extremely hard to win, even in the easy stages. We also found that your character will just stop running altogether even though you are still running.

We have tried in the day time, at night-time, with different people of height and weight, recalibrating Kinect and it still performs so inadequately, we wanted to pick up a controller and break it.

We also know our Kinect is not broken as without changing anything about the environment, Kinect Sports and other games worked flawlessly.

We tried to jump when it said jump.

Multiplayer

You can play with up to 3 other people offline, but seriously why would you want to make your friends mad by showing them such a lousy game.

Achievements

How are you supposed to even earn the achievements when the game doesn’t work? The achievements they tease you with are for beating the different difficulty stages and for doing random things with different avatars. It’s not a very fun mix even you manage to get it to work at all. Good luck with that.

Closing Comments

If Activision had put a bit more than what seems like $100 into the development, they probably could have had a fun game. Wipeout the TV show is entertaining and should make for a great Kinect game. Sadly they didn’t seem to care and what we get is what we can only assume is an awful attempt to cash in on a name. Don’t be fooled, it’s not worth even renting.

Score: 1/10