Game Review: Kinectimals

Kinectimals for Windows Phone is a stand-alone game that has optional integration with the Xbox 360 version.

Overall Score: 3/5

Unfortuantely, Kinectimals on WP7 is nothing impressive. Pass it up unless you have young kids or have $2.99 you don’t care about.

Gameplay: 3/5

When you think of Kinectimals, you imagine a fully immersive and intuitive game. When you play Kinectimals on Windows Phone, you don’t experience a single immersive element, even though they could have used the accelerometer and microphone to make it a better game. It’s disappointing. Once you get past that point, the game isn’t that bad, but it also isn’t that great. The game has some entertaining challenges where you either play fetch with your lion, make him jump the rope, or make him do tricks. These are the heart of the game. Fetch is basically a dumbed down version of Paper Toss, and isn’t as fun. The tricks mode is alright but some of the gestures like the Sit gesture doesn’t work well. However, the jump rope is pretty cool and becomes challenging when the speed of the rope rapidly changes. You can also feed your pet lion, clean him, buy him collars and clothes, and buy him new toys. And there’s also the camera mode where you can take a picture and virtually place your lion in it. Overall, the gameplay is interesting, but nothing super fun.

Presentation: 4/5

The game looks pretty good, and the music is fantastic. However, it isn’t Mango enabled and takes forever to load, which is lame.

Lasting Value: 3/5

Completing the game will take about 2 hours or more. That’s not much. Now that is only one single lion, and you could play with the others, but there’s really no incentive to do that. You can share content across with your Xbox 360, but otherwise the lasting value is weak.

Title: Kinectimals
Price: $2.99
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios