Motion Sickness: Kung Fu Rider

Written by Brock Poulsen, brockst4r Wednesday, 06 July 2011 05:00

Motion Sickness is a feature that sifts the proverbial motion control wheat from the waggle-heavy tares.  This time on Motion Sickness we look at Kung Fu Rider, the quirky downhill not-quite-racer for the Playstation Move.

Kung Fu Rider is basically a motion-control tech demo. The premise is somewhat intriguing: you play a private detective or his personal assistant who must flee from Chinese Triads. Cool, right? Well, "fleeing" from the Triads involves climbing aboard a rolling office chair or other wheeled object and meandering down a hill, clumsily dodging obstacles and inept criminals.  Yeah, that's significantly less cool.

The controls are awful and unintuitive. The closest comparison to be made would probably be Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam for the Wii, but that mediocre game was a masterpiece compared to Kung Fu Rider. This is a downhill racer with no racing and no real requirements other than "succumb to gravity." Toobin' was a deeper "racing" game than Kung Fu Rider is. Floating down the river in Oregon Trail was a better racing game than Kung Fu Rider.

The levels are bland repititions of the same environments and the same few obstacles continually repeated ad nauseum. I literally couldn't tell the difference between any of the first 4 levels. The characters are both obnoxious caricatures with the same few annoying sound clips.

I couldn't bring myself to play Kung Fu Rider to completion; the time I spent was so painful that I can't imagine any change that would redeem the experience.

Spend your motion control money elsewhere, and thank your lucky stars you didn't have to learn these lessons yourself.