Announced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) a few months ago, Raving Rabbids: Alive and Kicking sees the loveable, if daft white Rabbids invading Microsoft's Kinect sensor for the first time in the series' history. But while the more recent games have tried to harbour some sort of affection for the bug-eyed rabbits, this iteration seems to have gone back to the original game's hostility towards them - at least, in the selection of minigames we were shown from the thirty-something total, anyway. Just make sure you don't show it to the RSPCA.
The game started with a lone Rabbid wandering round your living room on the screen. Should you feel that way inclined, you could punch or kick in his general direction and send him flying, netting you points in the process. Beating up this Rabbid seems to anger the rest of them, and, through some fancy graphical trickery, they'll now start to pop up through holes they make in the floor, leaving it up to you to stamp on their squishy, rabbity head, to send them back to... wherever it was they came from. Interestingly, you actually had to stamp on them with some force, otherwise they'd just squish a bit - not good for those of us with Kinect upstairs. To rack up the most points, you'll need to get rid of multiple Rabbids at once, or at least in quick succession, which leaves you dancing around your living room, stamping on invisible rabbits, and looking like something of a loon, as pictured below.
On the right is my hairy Just Dance 2 buddy and Rabbids developer Adrian Lacey.
Continuing the human-on-Rabbid violence theme, the next game we played saw us guiding your poor, blindfolded Rabbid through an obstacle course, littered with upturned rakes, car batteries and oil slicks. But instead of trying not to crash into the obstacles, the object of the game is to cause your poor Rabbid as much pain as possible, in order to get the maximum amount of points. To get your rabbid to move forward, all you had to do was call him (by making a noise, or saying "come on!"), stepping from to one side or the other to change his direction, and manoeuvre him into the obstacles. You could have sat there saying "come on berk" if you wanted too, as it was just the sound of your voice that made him stumble towards you. I sounded more like I was calling a puppy over though, as I sent him straight onto an oil slick, sending him spinning straight into a rather shocking car battery - before getting him stuck in the brush of the car wash, which flung him off to the end of the course. Poor guy.
As a break from the Rabbid torment, came a spot of dancing - but rather than following any instructions, it was up to you to freestyle it in your living room. The Rabbids, being the impeccable judges of dance that they are, don't like bad dancers, so you had to be careful they didn't spot you. Showing you the Rabbids on screen, lazing around, not bothering to watch the TV they're supposed to be monitoring, it's up to you to dance around like a spoon, until a little yellow light starts glowing, warning you the Rabbids were about to turn round to check on their surveillance camera - at which point you need to make a dash for it, getting yourself and all your limbs off the screen, lest you lose some points.
After all the Rabbid-bashing and dancing, we'd worked up a bit of an appetite - and luckily, Raving Rabbids: Alive and Kicking had a solution. Two Rabbids got smacked in the face with chocolate cakes, and it was up to us to compete with the developer who was demonstrating the game, to lick it off their faces as fast as we could, by sticking our tongue out and manoeuvring our head to clean their little faces. This was also by far the best of the games to show off the game's habit for taking embarrassing pictures of you at inopportune moments, unfortunately, which can now also be uploaded to Facebook for maximum embarrassment.
The Rabbids don't seem very happy about that rabbit stew you had for tea...
One thing I was initially a bit worried about was the fact it only had thirty mini-games included - the first Raving Rabbids game had seventy, but a quick glance at Raving Rabbids: Travel In Time revealed there were only twenty or so in there, and that didn't seem overly short, so maybe thirty isn't as bad as I first thought (although Travel in Time did have a massive museum to explore, and an unfortunate acronym). I guess we'll see for definite when it releases sometime in November.
Raving Rabbids: Alive and Kicking seems like a solid addition to the (already over-flowing) Kinect mini-game market - but seeing as the Rabbids games are normally well above the competition in terms of quality, we hope it'll fair as well as the Wii versions. In fact, based on sales figures from December last year, the Rabbids franchise remains one of Ubisoft's best-sellers, with the franchise as a whole selling a whopping twenty nine million units - compared to Just Dance's four million. Although that is probably skewed by the sheer number of Rabbids games (around fifteen if you include all the platforms of all the games) as opposed to Just Dance's two iterations, it's still indicative of the craving the general public have for the unfortunate little bunnies. Come this Christmas, they're coming for you.
