Kinect Joy Ride

The main issue in Kinect Joy Ride is that you cannot break or accelerate. You are just moving your hands and pretend holding a steering wheel. Joy Ride is something for in between, but it is not motivating to play for hours and hours.

For parents looking for a game without the violence or complications and you're looking to get a Kinect for your kids, definitely check this game out if you're after a second game. However Kinect Sports come first than this!

And, like many of Kinect's titles, photos taken of the players capture all the ridiculousness. Kinect's launch-day racer lacks polish, and serious race fans will want to steer clear of its super-casual approach. However, if you're looking for a Kinect title with a fun, wind-in-your-hair approach to the genre, this one's worth taking for a spin.

"Quotation Forthcoming"

Kinect Joy Ride provides a crammed package with plenty of games, a fine selection of unlockables and a challenge that offers plenty of room for improvement of your skills. If you're looking for a launch title to really get your teeth into even when you're on your own, you could do much worse than this.

Kinect Joy Ride is a good racing game that will entertain your friends and family. The steering doesn't always work but that shouldn't stop casual gamers from buying this game.

This motion-controlled racer is fun, but it'd undoubtedly be better if you could play it with a regular controller.

A bizzare divide between the extremes of playing the game aside, Kinect Joy Ride plays well enough to justify use of the Kinect sensor, but there really isn't enough to it otherwise.

The first is that this game is definitely not for diehard racing fans as the content and control will turn them off. On the other side of the fence though is the fact that I truly think this game is not that bad at all, and it could be a real hit when Kinect owners have friends or family over and they want to do something different for the night.

What began as a promising little Arcade game turned into a poor showpiece for a new technology.

Kinect Joy Ride it's the racing game that uses Kinect to bring us a controller free driving experience, but the main flaw is the imprecise control that lacks the overall experience.

Overall the game is decent and fairly enjoyable, but considering how it doesn't really take advantage of what the system is capable of, it isn't much of a good game to have released alongside the new Kinect hardware.

Joy Ride is a fun game for casual riders, but its control isn't so much precise.

Joy Ride is a nice game with bad controls. Give the players the possibility to choose a classic control system, and this game will be awesome. The lack of precision due to the Kinect camera transforms a potentially great game in an average experience.

A funny game spoiled by the controls: the software is not polished enoguh to let Kinect catch all of your movements, resulting in a sometimes frustrating experience.

In the end, Kinect Joy Ride needed to take more chances in order to stand out from the racing crowd, and perhaps even offer controller support for those who aren't feeling the power of Microsoft's motion device.

Kinect Joy Ride can be entertaining for short play sessions with our friends, but ends up tiring the players very quickly, failing to offer enough variety and sense of challenge.

This is not an unplayable game by any stretch of the imagination, but, Kinect Joy Ride isn't as tight as it needs to be.

It's initially quite fun, but truth be told, steering with an invisible wheel gets a bit old after a couple of hours and the game has few pleasures to offer besides.

However Joyride is no worse than any launch title to come out of Wii in its earliest year. It sets its aim toward the casual family market and hits it, bull's-eye. In terms of light-weight casual games it gains points if only for the novelty value of not having a controller, and that's its niche.

Kinect body "controls" work surprisingly well.

The result is a game that unfortunately showcases why controllers exist in the first place. If you've got a brand new Kinect, stick to the dance and fitness games and avoid this one.

There are some brief moments of fun in Kinect Joy Ride, but most of the time you'll be too busy fighting the loose controls to really enjoy it. Making matters worse, the game would be an absolute pushover if you played it with a traditional analog stick and buttons. With shallow gameplay and just a handful of tracks, it certainly doesn't justify the $50 price tag.

Might just be proof that racing games will never work with Kinect.

Joy Ride doesn't offer what its name promises. The game looks nice enough and has a lot of different modes, but there's no feedback for your hands to know how much you should steer to the left or right. The results are frustrating.

Another clear example that Kinect developers must think new ideas instead of just adapting old gameplay mechanics that, honestly, don't work quite well with Microsoft's camera.

If there wasn't a decent racer attached to the gimmick, I wouldn't recommend it at all.

Kinect Joyride is not a game you should invest in, yet with a few tweaks here and there, it could have been something great.

It's fun for a while, but by no stretch of the imagination is it worth £35.

Yes, you really do feel in chargeof steering, but when the amount of speed put into a tight bend is dictated by the game, not the player, that feeling only delivers so much. [Christmas 2010, p.98]

Whilst Kinect Joyride does offer some fun moments, the fact you never really feel in control this is' very short lived…probably just like the game will be in your collection.

Some fun to be had, but not for long. [Feb 2011, p.108]

This is a game that feels like an expanded tech demo.

No. This is not how you drive a car.

Kinect Joy Ride could have been a great partygame. Unfortunately, the extremely broken controls, boring racetracks, and long loading times makes this game a bore. Even if the promising control scheme would have worked like it should, the game would have been far too simple to really care about.

The driving mechanic in itself is an interesting display of ever-increasing possibilities of the kit, and we look forward to seeing its like implemented in more compulsive, sophisticated titles further down the line. [Issue#104, p.127]

The racing is twee and unsatisfying. [Jan 2011]

The overall feel of the game is just not engaging – there's no sense of speed, there's no sense of control, and there's no sense of variety.

There's not enough content in this package, and the progression aspects are woefully lacking. For the most part you're expected to keep playing to rank up stats, rather than a compelling campaign.

"Quotation Forthcoming"

In the end, that's the whole game that doesn't hold up.

Joy Ride, bless it, tries desperately hard to be Microsoft's answer to Mario Kart on so many levels which makes it even more cringeworthy to see it fall flat on its face every time. With twitchy controls, uninspired gameplay, and a sheer lack of any sense of speed or adrenaline that you're supposed to get from a racer, Joy Ride is anything but what its name suggests.

For those who want a decent game to accompany Kinect there are much better and more solid alternatives than Joy Ride.

Even if this was free it still wouldn't be worth it.