Fighters Uncaged Hands-On

Fighting games are a pretty natural fit for motion controls, regardless of the technology involved, but Sony was first out of the gate with a fighting game that reflects a more mature sensibility for its PlayStation Move platform. Ubisoft has answered with a brutal (but not bloody) motion-controlled fighter of its own for Microsoft’s Kinect hardware, called Fighters Uncaged. As you can imagine, the whole point of Fighters Uncaged is to have the Kinect camera translate your real-life punches and kicks into in-game actions that approximate the real thing. When you throw a punch, your in-game avatar throws a punch.

From our brief hands-on with the game, we noticed that there was a delay between when we performed a move and when the game mimicked the move onscreen. Of course, some of that just had to do with getting used to the timing of the game and figuring out what our fighter was and wasn’t capable of doing in terms of punches and kicks. Once we got a little more accustomed to the timing, the ever-so-slight delay didn’t seem nearly as noticeable, but we still had some trouble performing a dodge as well as a foot sweep, which requires you to dip your head back or bend down slightly and kick your leg forward, respectively.

At any rate, there are quite a few other moves that seem easier to master. Members of the development team claim that your fighter in Fighters Uncaged has access to about 70 moves (though that number includes both left and right side moves as well as special moves), and it’s nice to see how the variety comes into play over the course of a fight. Since all of the game’s 12 opponents behave in different ways, you have to mix up your fighting repertoire to beat them. For example, in one fight, the enemy kept trying to get close, making it difficult to throw any sort of decent combination of punches. But throwing a few stiff kicks to his abdomen got him to back off just enough to where we could pepper him with a few jabs, overhead punches, and back fists. One of our quick elbows even blinded our opponent, allowing us to get in a few cheap shots while he couldn’t see, so the game doesn’t mind letting you fight a little dirty.

Still, you have to keep in mind a few different things in Fighters Uncaged. Some moves won’t automatically make contact, simply because you’re not in range--a short jab probably isn’t going to have a good chance of connecting if your opponent is standing at a fairly safe distance. The key is to be mindful of the icons that appear near the bottom of the screen that indicate range and to observe how your opponent blocks or dodges attacks. The game plays off this even further with the addition of a focus meter that shows the general state of your opponent: blue means that he's relaxed and willing to block and dodge, while red means he's going to start punching and kicking like there’s no tomorrow. You also have a meter in your arsenal that you charge by successfully dodging attacks. When it's full, you can release it by shouting (actually yelling at your TV), which then causes your fighter to perform a devastating super strike that takes off quite a bit of health.

The game is depicted from a drawn-out camera that sits somewhat at an angle behind your brawler. This allows you to see how your opponent is blocking and get a pretty clear view of the punches and kicks he's about to throw. Simultaneously, however, this camera perspective doesn’t really give a good idea of how detailed the game is--as they stand now in their early state, the game’s visuals could use some beefing up. We’ll be interested to see what kinds of changes Ubisoft makes in that regard as well as some of the tweaks it makes to the fighting engine before the game’s release, which is scheduled to coincide with the release of Kinect on November 4.