Gameplay Today - Because You're Always Gaming

If there has been one legitimate complaint about the Kinect peripheral and the games released for the Xbox 360 add-on, it’s been the lack of “core” games for released for it. Sega took note of this and has released what can only be described as the most hardcore game released for Kinect on Xbox 360 with the gore fest that is Rise of Nightmares. Developed by the same team behind House of the Dead, everything you’d expect from a B-movie slasher film is here including over-the-top gruesome antics and a story that tries to be something it isn’t.

You never want to give away too much about a game’s story, but in the case of Rise of Nightmares the plot is so pointless that there’s no real concern of ruining anything. Derailed trains, a kidnapped wife and a castle combine to make one of the silliest plots to grace a game on the Xbox 360. There’s even a ridiculous and clichéd mad scientist to round everything out and up the cheese factor.

Despite the story amounting to something written by a college student for a horror movie project, the game delivers more gore than most people would expect. Considering the family-friendly reputation the Kinect has built up since its release, this game seems like a very odd fit. There’s no doubt there are a lot of core gamers out there who own Kinect, but it’s still strange to such a graphic title hit the motion-controller. There’s more blood and guts in this game than most zombie, first-person shooters and survival horror games released this generation combined. There’s no doubt the Mature rating this title received is warranted.

The gameplay might be surprising to Kinect veterans and anyone who watch trailers prior to the release of Rise of Nightmares. Many got the impression that this title was on rails, but you actually have a full range of motion and control over where you want to go. This is nice, but at the same time brings up Kinect’s biggest issue – control. We’re not blaming the hardware, but there are more than a few instances where controlling Josh (the game’s star) is frustrating. Sega tried to side step the control issues by providing you with the option of an Auto Walk feature. This is nice and does help while at the same time admitting to players that the controls are a little faulty and need assistance.

Combat is fun and satisfying to say the least. Kicking zombies and hacking their limbs off with actual movements on your part is very awesome and something we all expected when motion controls started to hit the scene a few years back. It’s not the combat that is the problem here though. It’s simply navigating through the castle and maneuvering through hallways that frustrates. You would think the simplest thing to do in a videogame is walk forwards, backwards and turn. Of course the Kinect hardware makes simple things very difficult. Nothing here is broken, but you do face a lot of frustration from things that you would never think would be a problem.

Where Rise of Nightmares fails is the repetitive gameplay. You’ll grow tired of taking out the waves of undead before you’ve even completed one third of the game. There’s just not a lot of depth here. In all honesty, the game feels like an Xbox LIVE Arcade title that someone decided to spread out way too far and as a result it is spread way too thin. Considering the attention span of gamers these days, Sega had to know there wasn’t enough here to hold the interest of most people. Tack on the frustration of headaches you’ll experience simply trying to walk forward and backward and you’ve got another underachieving title on Kinect.

The game looks nice enough and you’ll be hard pressed to find anything to complain about regarding the graphics and environments. The audio however is downright bad. The voice acting is so cheesy and annoying that the mood and atmosphere that Rise of Nightmares tries so hard to create is broken every time some ridiculous line of dialog is spoken. When a game has this much blood and gore, you’d think you would at least be a little scared. However, when you can’t even walk in a straight line or stop from laughing at the horrible voice acting, you know the game failed to reach its goal. With only an hour’s worth of gameplay spread out to fill time and comically bad mechanics, the only nightmares that will be rising from this release is the potential of another bad sequel.