Your Shape: Fitness Evolved Review (K: 7/10)

Like so many other titles in the Kinect launch line-up, you can easily see Ubisoft's incentive for making Your Shape Fitness Evolved: Wii Fit was a massive hit on Nintendo's family-orientated console, so taking away the oft temperamental Balance Board in exchange for actually using your body in physical workouts sounds like a sure-fire recipe for success. To give it credit, Fitness Evolved comes very close to being the perfect fitness experience for video gamers to get off the sofa and participate in, but a couple of foreseeable errors hold it back from that spot. Calibration is key here, as the game maps your body height, shoulder span and an all manner of parts you probably never knew the names of to create an accurate training scheme for you alone, and while this can take a little while once the actual activities get going Fitness Evolved is great exercise. Everything from streches to active rhythm routines has been included, so any part of the body can easily be targeted, and if you haven't simply bought Your Shape to be left exhausted then there are a number of diverse games to have a go at. Fitness Evolved works fine in all those respects, but sometimes the Kinect camera can tend to lag somewhat trying to keep up with your movements, occassionally pausing vigorous routines to find your body. If this problem occured in other games such as Kinect Adventures and Sports, it would be a little more forgivable here, but as it does not it's hard not to think that something went awry in the game's programming (perhaps due to a rush to have it out for launch day of Kinect?). No matter what the reason for this flaw, it's clear that given how often it happens it needs to be remedied in the next Your Shape, at which point the Xbox 360 might just have an excellent exclusive on its hands!