When we played last year's Your Shape: Fitness Evolved on Kinect for the Xbox 360, our legs ached for the next few weeks. An easy, fun fitness game it was not - Your Shape: Fitness Evolved was the sort of game that practically required you to be a pro athlete in tip-top shape to begin with, before you even started training. Somewhat confused in its target audience (one of the answers you could choose in the quiz at the beginning, where the game's deciding on your fitness plan, was that you have trouble getting up the stairs - and then it gets you to do twenty squats, without warm-ups), we didn't have the best of times with the original game. It was with something of a sense of trepidation, then, that we approached Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012, the newest update in the game that kills our thighs. But this time, we were in for a pleasant surprise.
Seemingly taking all the feedback on board, Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012 is a lot more accessible for those of us who don't hit the gym every night after work for three hours of cardiovascular training. With a range of activities, workouts, and minigames on offer, each of which are guaranteed to make your muscles ache and your pulse race - although not quite to the extreme of before - Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012 uses the Kinect sensor to put you into the game - literally. Scanning your body in as you start playing, it's a fancy effect, although we've yet to find out what purpose it has. Either way, while you're performing the exercises, playing the minigames, or dancing the dances, you'll see yourself, standing there, in video form, performing the moves alongside the in game instructors.
It's more colourful this year too. Which is nice.
Things are a little bit different this time around. To begin with, it doesn't ask you to fill in a survey to begin with, in order for it to figure out your fitness plan, as this is an option you can select for yourself. If you want to delve in and do the exercises you want, you can feel free, but we'd recommend doing the survey, and telling the game a bit about yourself first - how fit you are, what your fitness goals are, etc. Anything from not ending up out of breath all the time to sports training are available, and once you've filled in the questionnaire, the game will put together a plan for you, recommending how long you should exercise for, and how often, along with sticking a little mark on any of the exercises it recommends for you.
Head back to the menu, and you'll be presented with a long list of exercises for you to choose from, divided into categories - activities, workouts, and classes. There's a lot more variety on offer here than last year's po-faced fitness-at-all-costs game (although there's still plenty of that under workouts if you really want it), with activities and workouts providing some slower, but still fairly active distractions that serve as great warm-ups, or wind-downs from the action. Under Activities is where you'll find the minigames here - there's a cool game that sees you smashing as many blocks as you can by punching across your body (ones on the left get punched with the right hand, ones on the right with the left), and a skipping minigame that's bound to get your heart racing. Meanwhile, under classes, there's a great selection of extra-curricular activities - from the slow paced fun of dance classes and yoga, to the intense, fat destroying bootcamp lessons, each of which gives you a chance to exercise in a way that suits you.
Meanwhile, under Workouts, you'll find a selection of now ready tagged exercises that Your Shape recommends. Each workout has an intensity rating, represented by a signal-strength like bar, and a stopwatch which tells you how many minutes it lasts for. Ranging from 2 to over 30 minutes, there's a huge range of exercises for people just getting into this whole exercise thing, to those looking to push themselves right to the limit.
Run the world is another interesting mode, which gets you to jog through virtual recreations of famous cities. Shame they're all so boring and white though.
While it still requires a lot of space, for 2012, the space requirements have apparently been trimmed down a little bit, although we didn't really notice. What we did notice was that the tracking seems to have improved, but it's still not as good as it really should be. When you're doing each of the exercises, the game will show you two things it's tracking in the top right hand corner - like keeping your shoulders off the ground, and stretching your legs out - and it'll tick them off with each repetition you do. Unfortunately, as far as we could tell, we were matching everything it said to do, but the game kept telling us we weren't doing it right. It gets worse when it comes to floor moves, and this is one of the reason the game needs so much space - for several of the moves, you'll need to lie on the floor, or stretch out backwards, so those with small living rooms (like most of us) will find it tricky. And although the game not registering you're doing the move properly doesn't affect your workout in real life, if the game doesn't think you're doing it properly, it'll think you've burnt less calories, so there'll be less rewards waiting for you at the end. It doesn't seem fair to basically kill yourself doing a workout, following the instructions to a T, only for the sensor to mess up tracking you and decide you weren't doing it right. As we said, it's better than it was last year, but it's still not quite right.
Another minor issue is the fact that it's not entirely obvious what each workout's for. While some are obviously labelled as "glutes" or "abs", the first one's labelled "100% (A)", and we have literally no idea what that means. Select the workout, and while it tells you how many beats per minute the exercise is, it doesn't tell you what you'll actually be doing - so if there's an exercise you want to avoid for some reason, whether it's through personal preference or an injury that stops you putting too much pressure on something, you won't know until you've loaded up the workout, which seems like a bit of a silly oversight. It's also a big no-no for anyone playing upstairs, or in an apartment, as the amount of jumping you're required to do will definitely annoy the neighbours.
But with a decent selection of exercise types, minigames, and serious workouts, aimed at a range of abilities, Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012 is at the very least a major step in the right direction. If you have the space to run it (you're looking at at least ten feet of unobstructed space from Kinect to you, and a fair amount of width, too), and are looking for something a little bit more stressing than Wii Fit, this could be up your street.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
