No one said making a launch title would be easy. In fact, launch titles are always the hardest titles to get out for a system throughout its entire lifetime, mostly because a launch title has to showcase a system's power, it has to make the publishing studio look good and most importantly, it has to help sell the system.
Unfortunately for Ubisoft's Kinect exclusive, Fighter Within, they managed to completely miss the boat on every single aspect of making the game anything remotely resembling a potentially decent game and they paid for it dearly in multiple reviews, with Game Informer's being one of the most brutally honest and harsh critiques ever.
The Game Informer review for The Fighter Within was written and composed by author Dan Ryckert, and he makes it painfully obvious that he's not a Doritocrat by a long shot. He drills the game and the Kinect for poor response timing, poor combos, terrible character designs, lack of gameplay incentives, laughable writing and the worst sin of all: ridiculously broken gameplay.
It doesn't make sense to recap the entire article, but I will post the last paragraph that seems to sum up Ryckert's frustrations with the game in a simple enough manner, as the reviewer writes...
“From its unreliable (or non-functional) mechanics to its doofy character designs and hilariously bad writing, Fighter Within is garbage. It fails to operate on any level, and the content isn’t deep enough to be fun even if everything worked. If you were hoping for an Xbox One launch title that shows off the technological leaps made by the new Kinect, you certainly won’t find it with Fighter Within.”
That sentiment is actually a rather tame collection of shortened thoughts from a much larger, more visceral blackboard of hatred where Ryckert put his thoughts to a web page like Dennis Rodman wearing crazy on a sleeve like it was going out of style.
If you think that the 1/10 Game Informer review was harsh, it's actually only the second website to harshly slam down the reviewer hammer like Microsoft kicking Xbox Live Silver users out of a multiplayer game where Xbox Live Gold is required. The first website to hold nothing back and go all-in on the 1 out of 10 train was, you guessed it, Eurogamer.
Regarding the special moves, combos and counters, Eurogamer's Ellie Gibson holds nothing back, creating an orgasmic collage of game features even the most sadomasochistic emo would be too scared to dabble in willfully. The review is like a rundown of some of the most hate-filled checklists for one of the most tedious and mechanically broken games I've ever had the displeasure of reading about, with Gibson writing...
“The problem is it's impossible to perform the majority of these moves deliberately. Pulling one off always feels like the result of luck rather than skill. It's as if the Kinect can't cope with complex manoeuvres, so the game chucks in special stuff at random to create the illusion of layers of complexity. There are layers in a s*** sandwich, but it's still a s*** sandwich.”
I've never eaten a sandwich like that before, but the thought of it smells nasty in my mind's nose.
Conveniently enough, there were no games of equal caliber to compare Fighter Within to in our Metacritic comparisons for the Xbox One and PS4, but it doesn't really matter because the game is in a league all its own... a league specifically created for aborted ideas that were wrongfully put into production.
Gather information about this game cautiously, and play at your own risk.
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