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Tuesday, February 02, 2021

Ring Fit Adventure is a bad exercise game

Allie with Daylight Only by Picture Zealot from flickr (CC-NC-ND)

I really like exercise games, but Ring Fit Adventure is particularly terrible.

Its primary problem is that it will endlessly show you instructions to do every move, no matter how many times you've seen them before, and there's no way to skip them.

I thought the "Quick Play" option would just let me go straight into minigames, but nope, full length unskippable instructions every time.

In adventure mode, the game has a timer for exercise time. Try using phone's stopwatch in parallel - you'll see dead time caused by instructions and other unskippable bullshit is longer than actual exercise time!

There are some other issues, like it has far too much nonsense with collectibles, really loves to stress your knees instead of muscles, and it recognizes a few moves like hip shaking poorly, but these are really minor compared with the main issue with majority of game time being taken by endlessly repeating unskippable instructions.

Nintendo's old Wii Fit had a lot less of this nonsense.

The best exercise game of all times is of course still Dance Dance Revolution - you can either exercise nonstop, or take like 10s breaks every 2 minutes to select a new song, and that's perfect pace to take a sip of water. You're in the zone all the time.

For some other games I tried, Just Dance for Wii was mostly terrible as it was terrible at recognizing moves.

Watching youtube while on stationary bike is also a reasonable home exercise, even though there's not much game in it.

Overall Switch has been a huge disappointment. Other than Super Mario Odyssey which was legitimately great, all other games were either nothing special (both Pokemon games), or just overhyped thrash (Zelda).

1 comment:

lpiob said...

I've enjoyed Zelda, and I've enjoyed Wittcher 3 - my first playthrough was on Switch. I've spent 100+ hours in each of these games. Both were worth their price.

As for Ring Fit - I have my copy, the premise is entertaining, but the game did not keep my interest for longer than maybe 10 hours. Pity I don't have Wii Fit to compare.