Rabbids: Alive & Kicking

It was pretty much inevitable that a Rabbids game would make it to Kinect. The Rabbids games have always been wacky, mini-game fun and have found creative ways of utilising technology – such as using your bum on a Wii Balance Board to help a Rabbid ride a bull down a mountain. Kinect gives more opportunities for craziness – of course the Rabbids were going to take it up.

The game starts with a hilarious opening sequence involving the Rabbids using a giant cow to create even more Rabbids. So many in fact that they’re bursting out of manhole covers and fire hydrants in an unsuspecting town. It’s just there to be funny and entertaining. While there seems to be a very thin storyline about Rabbids taking over (as usual) it’s not really important. Then again, if you are looking for a deep story, why are you here in the first place?

Alive & Kicking is, like the rest of the Rabbids games, a mini-game compendium. It’s a fun concept, but the Rabbids are now a well-established franchise enough that it feels routine to see another game out. In any case, the usual modes are there: Quick Play mode for 1-4 players, Party mode for 3-16 players (yes, you read right – although not all 16 players will be playing at once!) and a ‘My Raving Rabbid’ mode, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

The mini-games are silly, as to be expected, and can be fun, especially if you’re playing with other people. The game also snaps pictures at embarrassing moments to be stored in your album, or instantly deleted. Kinect works better with some games than others and there are flashes of cleverness here and there, but ultimately the novelty wears off rather quickly and loading times for one minute-long games can be frustrating.

Talking of frustrating, the painfully awkward scrolling menu system is my biggest gripe with this game. There’s a scroll bar with the top and bottom two sections for scrolling through menus slow/fast up/down and the middle section needs to be highlighted and swiped to select an option. This scrolling menu is very fiddly. My recommendation is to switch instantly to controller mode and save yourself the hassle.

Back to the mini-games. The majority of the games have your standard Kinect repertoire of movements: fast running; crouching to dive and jumping up to, well, jump; dodging by sidestepping, etc. but there are moments when standard movements are jazzed up. One hilarious game involves swimming upstream like a salmon, standing with arms up and wiggling in order to move faster. Another game involves moving your head around (with or without tongue out) to lick chocolate off a Rabbid’s face. It’s moments like these that bring the laughter and fun among other standard Kinect fare. One of my favourite games involves timing hits in correct spots to bat back the cars and things that a giant rampaging Rabbid robot is throwing at you. Oh, and there’s the Augmented Reality game where Rabbids pop up through the floor – that’s pretty fun, too!

Sometimes the new things work, sometimes they don’t. One game involves guiding Rabbids like Lemmings by using your hands to hover over buttons that activate/deactivate bridges. However, another game involves crouching and standing to move a paddle like a one-sided game of Pong. In this game, the subtle movements required to move your paddle in the right place means that the execution is very awkward and uncomfortable.

It wouldn’t be a Rabbids game without giving you the chance to dress up a Rabbid and ‘My Raving Rabbid’ lets you do that. You can purchase extra costumes and props with the ‘Toilet Paper Dollarz’ (…) you earn through playing the mini-games. The Rabbid appears on screen in Augmented Reality fashion. You yourself will appear on screen and can interact with the Rabbid. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good attempt. You can direct the Rabbid around the screen among other things, but if he doesn’t listen then the game actively encourages happy slapping in order to get him to obey!

Some might find it hilarious – one person I played the game with certainly did – but after the first few bouts of laughter I found it more unsettling than funny as it continued. Each to their own I suppose; maybe it’s not my sense of humour.