Basically its a collection of demos, but they're decent.
Kinect Adventures is essentially a collection of tech demos bundled together to show off the Kinect's capabilities and potential. They aren't deep, and aside from river raft, they aren't particularly polished. They do manage to be somewhat entertaining, and show off some surprising capabilities of the Kinect.
The first game you'll play is handball. Its the same game you've seen in Microsoft's pre-release demos, and an entertaining introduction. The tracking feels a little sluggish though. I had good results when I moved my body as a human breakout paddle, but still can't quite get the hang of swinging at, or kicking, the ball.
River Raft is next. This is probably the best of the lot. The presentation is excellent and the simple controls are remarkably intuitive. I felt a sense of vertigo as I went over waterfalls or sharp rapids, and the colorful environments are well realized. There's a Mario Bros. appeal to jumping over ramps and sliding to the left and right to collect coins.
Reflex Ridge is similar, but the controls are a little trickier. You ride through a virtual mine shaft as various obstacles pop up for you to dodge. Jumping feels a bit odd, and crouches sometimes lag a bit. Dodging to the left and right was frustrating until I learned to keep my arms pulled in so I didn't brush the barriers by mistake.
Next up, you're trapped in a glass box under the water as various fish knock holes in it for you to cover with your hands--or so I thought. After you've been moving on a parallel plane to the Kinect for the previous activities, this one comes as a bit of a shock once you need to step forward, backwards and use your entire play space (and body) playing little Dutch boy. Its a pretty cool demonstration of the Kinect's potential, but not exactly compelling.
As is the pop the bubbles game. Once I figured out how to fly, I had fun with this one. But the depth of field isn't portrayed well, nor is it sensed well. Its fun to float up and down, left and right, but the movement on the backwards and forwards plane just doesn't feel right. Its simply far too easy to step too far forward or backwards out of the play zone.
As an adult, this isn't a title I'll come back to often. But I will keep it for when children are around. Its an adequate demonstration of the Kinect's capabilities, and gives you a hint as to the device's future potential as developers learn to leverage its capabilities.
One final note: game startup standards with the Kinect need to be established. All modern games feature splash screens upon boot, but while you can usually click a controller button to skip them on a traditional game, there is no way to dismiss them with the Kinect. Adventures compounds this annoyance by performing a calibration each time you launch it, and though its simple, it gets annoying. It takes too long to get from disk launch to the start menu, and you'll grumble under your breath after seeing the Microsoft Studios logo for the umpteenth time. The Fitness Evolved boot was nowhere near as intrusive, so this is ultimately a design decision. Hopefully publishers will consider this as they design their boot splashes.