In order to do some testing, I’ve played during the day with multiple lights in multiple positions as well as light coming in from the window and I’ve tried playing at night with just a couple lights (not a ceiling-mounted one) and I have to say, it’s just an exercise in futility. My character flies around the screen, often arms and legs are not seen properly and getting a perfect lighting setup seems to require an expert from Hollywood or one of those lights they use to attract people to nightclubs. The game still can’t seem to pull out my red shirt and blue pants from the plain white background on a regular basis, nor can it do so with my dark green hoodie. Yet at the same time the Kinect on my Xbox 360 does so perfectly in the exact same lighting. I know, different technology...
The gameplay, when you manage to get it to work, is fairly energetic and movement intensive. However, for those that are actually trained in a martial art, you’ll find that simply waving your arms back and forth works just as well as maintaining any actual form or actual moves.
Be warned, if a fighting area has multiple levels, it is nearly impossible to navigate them properly, especially when you need to fight a particular person and to do that you need to get to a higher or lower level. Often you will end up at the physical limit of the camera and still need to move in the same direction. This makes the game far more frustrating than fun and I ended up turning the game off in disgust much of the time.
The game is set in a comic-book world and the detail and graphics of the game are great. Often though, you will appear so small on the screen that it doesn’t really matter what you look like. In my case, my legs were often missing due to lighting making me even smaller. The actual comic book graphics are well done and enjoyable. The sounds are also quite well done including the voice over work. An added feature of the game is that you can snap photos of yourself in certain positions that will then be put into the story-based comic pages in between the actual levels.
Overall, unless you have a completely empty background to play the game in (meaning nothing hanging on the wall, no furniture) and high contrast clothing coupled with powerful floodlighting you might just want to skip this game. There’s no way to play the main game with a controller so all in all the game experience is seriously diminished by the environment. Considering that they made the game using a single camera in the Playstation Eye I have to give the credit, they did a good job. Unfortunately, finding an actually playable environment is ridiculously difficult and simply makes the game not worth the time. I just can’t understand the massive difference between the gameplay on the show floor and the horrible version playing here in the office.
I was really looking forward to this game and the sheer level of frustration involved in trying to get a usable environment was a massive disappointment. Perhaps a Kinect version in the future would be better?
