Wait, what's with all the skin?

When I first heard that Michael Phelps was lending his name to a swimming game for Kinect, I wasn’t sure which way they were going to go with it. The Kinect sensor has enough precision that it could have been a swim trainer, minus the whole kicking part. As a beginner triathlete, the thought of using Kinect to help me with my swimming stroke was intriguing, however, I can also see that kind of experience having limited appeal. Thankfully for the masses, 505 Games have gone in a different direction, making it a more casual friendly experience.

Instead of analyzing your stroke technique, the Kinect sensor picks up the timing of your strokes. You have to stick to a certain tempo otherwise you’ll slow down and/or lose stamina. All races start with you crouched down in the start position, then you stand up quickly to simulate the start. From there you go through your race, trying to match the tempo given by the game, until you get near the end. From there you “push the limit” where you stroke as fast as you can until just before you reach the wall, when you have to do the trademark Phelps reach at just the right time.

Dangerously close to an M for Mature rating.

The game features a career mode where you train and enter races, all while Phelps coaches you. As you progress, you get skill points that you can use to upgrade various attributes for your swimmer. The game will also feature multiplayer racing for up to eight players over Xbox live. All four main stroke disciplines (free style, breast, butterfly, back) are available in the game, and races can be 50m, 100m, or 200m, though the 200m races I was told will not be full races (likely due to them being quite long), and will feature some sort of mini-game in the middle to speed things up.

Still, given this, one major omission is that there is apparently no Individual Medley event (where a swimmer does all four strokes in the race). Considering that Phelps won Gold in Beijing in both the 200m and 400m Individual Medley events (and still holds the World Record in the 400), I’m not sure why they couldn’t have featured this event somehow in the game.

Luckily, Speedos are not required to play.

Michael Phelps: Push the Limit will be suited to gamers of all ages given the easy controls (though matching tempo may be difficult for the youngest gamers) and its focus on keeping tempo vs. proper stroke technique, though I would be concerned about how much replay value will be in the game besides the career mode. Price will be a determining factor here, of course, and hopefully we’ll find out more as we get closer to release, scheduled for later this year.