So it should come as no surprise that I like fighting games. Am I a pro that can go to EVO and beat all the greatest? Hell no. I am just a passionate fan who would no doubt get destroyed in online matches. I even like the bad fighting games like Mortal Kombat: Armageddon and Rise of the Robots. But then we get to today’s game, Fighter Within… for the Kinect. I honestly thought Kinect was over and done with after Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, but nope, it somehow manages to pump out garbage. Leeching off of the 360 in the last stages of its life and then moving on to the Xbox One afterward (As if the Xbox One didn’t have enough problems at launch), Fighter Within was released for the Kinect by Daoka Studios, a Belgian company who have made nothing else of interest, and was published by Ubisoft. Ugh, yeah, get used to seeing Ubisoft appear a lot this holiday season. Normally I’d ask you how bad it could be, but this game is on the Kinect. The only way I can think of it being any worse is if someone was kicking you in the dick repeatedly. But even that would be less painful.
So Fighter Within is a game with a set list of characters. These aren’t the worst characters I’ve ever seen, I mean, come on, I grew up with Mortal Kombat: Deception. These characters give a sort of Tekken vibe to them. The graphics are alright. Nothing too ugly, nothing completely offensive. That being said, are you really going to remember designs like Matt, Vince, or Faergas. Street Fighter, this is not. So then we get into the main campaign… After a moment of loading. I timed it, it takes fifty seconds each time for the game to load. So it must be real powerful- And it’s still images for cutscenes… I am not one to complain about cutscenes having, say, a comic book or graphic novel look to them for their cutscenes, I think it’s fine, but these are just the character models standing around, talking to each other. And the voice acting and dialogue are really bad. It’s what a child thinks sounds cool to say after binging a bunch of their dad’s action movies. So after a short introduction using random words that make no sense and expecting you to know right away, we can finally start the actual game. And holy shit, this is a joke.
You cannot move anywhere on the area. You have two movements. You can backstep, and you can move forward. That’s it. You cannot circle around your opponent, so if your opponent locks you near the edge of the ring, you’d better hope your character turns away or you’ll ring out and lose. Occasionally you’ll do a grab. How do you do it, I don’t know. It’s so hard to pull off, it almost feels like luck thanks to the Kinect’s garbage controls. So screw the grabs and screw strategy, we’re gonna Star Platinum this shit and just unleash a series of punches into this motherfucker. I say punches, but it’s more like slapping each other with wet noodles they call arms. I found it works really well if you just sock your opponent in the dick. And get used to hearing the words High Straight Combo when you… somehow do a special move, because the announcer says it every time, and you do it more times than you would think. It’s honestly grating after a while. So after baring through the tutorials, I got a friend to suffer with me. So after picking our characters (By the way, picking characters with motion controls are a goddamn mess because the motion controls slides your hand all over the place and just selecting them by moving your hand forward and then away makes it a nauseating experience. I didn’t think I had to mention that, but there you go), we could barely play the game from laughing. We couldn’t play it anyway, but this was a special kind of mess. After a while, we just had to stop. So I will say this, Fighter Within was a more endearing fighting game experience than any of the Blazblue games.
So after laying two rounds, we were exhausted, our guts hurt, and we just gave up. I think I got the amount I needed for such a game like this. Fighter Within is as low as a fighting game as you can get. It’s not frustrating, or so I would think given the fact that I refuse to play the story mode any more, but man, on a technical level, this is one of the worst fighting games I’ve ever played. But hey, it’s good for a laugh. So if you have a Kinect, for some ungodly reason, force your friends to play it and I’m sure you’ll get a laugh. On that note, I leave you with a fun fact. Ieft my copy of Fighter Within at my friends house because he owns a Kinect and I don’t, and when he came to return it, I told him to keep it. Just a little side story.
So Fighter Within is a game with a set list of characters. These aren’t the worst characters I’ve ever seen, I mean, come on, I grew up with Mortal Kombat: Deception. These characters give a sort of Tekken vibe to them. The graphics are alright. Nothing too ugly, nothing completely offensive. That being said, are you really going to remember designs like Matt, Vince, or Faergas. Street Fighter, this is not. So then we get into the main campaign… After a moment of loading. I timed it, it takes fifty seconds each time for the game to load. So it must be real powerful- And it’s still images for cutscenes… I am not one to complain about cutscenes having, say, a comic book or graphic novel look to them for their cutscenes, I think it’s fine, but these are just the character models standing around, talking to each other. And the voice acting and dialogue are really bad. It’s what a child thinks sounds cool to say after binging a bunch of their dad’s action movies. So after a short introduction using random words that make no sense and expecting you to know right away, we can finally start the actual game. And holy shit, this is a joke.
You cannot move anywhere on the area. You have two movements. You can backstep, and you can move forward. That’s it. You cannot circle around your opponent, so if your opponent locks you near the edge of the ring, you’d better hope your character turns away or you’ll ring out and lose. Occasionally you’ll do a grab. How do you do it, I don’t know. It’s so hard to pull off, it almost feels like luck thanks to the Kinect’s garbage controls. So screw the grabs and screw strategy, we’re gonna Star Platinum this shit and just unleash a series of punches into this motherfucker. I say punches, but it’s more like slapping each other with wet noodles they call arms. I found it works really well if you just sock your opponent in the dick. And get used to hearing the words High Straight Combo when you… somehow do a special move, because the announcer says it every time, and you do it more times than you would think. It’s honestly grating after a while. So after baring through the tutorials, I got a friend to suffer with me. So after picking our characters (By the way, picking characters with motion controls are a goddamn mess because the motion controls slides your hand all over the place and just selecting them by moving your hand forward and then away makes it a nauseating experience. I didn’t think I had to mention that, but there you go), we could barely play the game from laughing. We couldn’t play it anyway, but this was a special kind of mess. After a while, we just had to stop. So I will say this, Fighter Within was a more endearing fighting game experience than any of the Blazblue games.
So after laying two rounds, we were exhausted, our guts hurt, and we just gave up. I think I got the amount I needed for such a game like this. Fighter Within is as low as a fighting game as you can get. It’s not frustrating, or so I would think given the fact that I refuse to play the story mode any more, but man, on a technical level, this is one of the worst fighting games I’ve ever played. But hey, it’s good for a laugh. So if you have a Kinect, for some ungodly reason, force your friends to play it and I’m sure you’ll get a laugh. On that note, I leave you with a fun fact. Ieft my copy of Fighter Within at my friends house because he owns a Kinect and I don’t, and when he came to return it, I told him to keep it. Just a little side story.
Back at PSX 2016 Jones announced promotions for The Last Of Us Part ll. At E3 2018 he announced promotions for The Last Of Us Part ll. Currently IGN rumors that The Last Of Us Part ll will release within 2019 however Naughty Dog has yet to confirm this. With The Last Of Us and other new music releasing this year. It could be a good turn around for Jones as he prepares for a possible new album.