Microsoft’s own Kinect Sports Seasons One and Two are the standard bearers for Kinect sports minigame titles, but with Kinect stealing the Wii’s momentum as the family gaming console of choice, it’s no surprise to see a steadily increasing number of minigame and party titles, each fighting to stand out in the crowd. Smack in the middle of the pack is Activision’s Big League Sports, which offers a collection of minigames with full Kinect controls.

The Parent Perspective

If anyone’s going to really enjoy Big League Sports, it’s going to be a younger audience. It’s bright and colourful, and features six popular sports packaged as quick-bite minigames. The games themselves are sensible pieces of each sport, hitting on major elements that you would immediately associate with the sport.

The good news is that the Kinect controls are surprisingly capable, which will help said younger gamers avoid the frustration that has accompanied many of the initial Kinect titles. With some Kinect titles, the game just never quite feels right, or it doesn’t seem to track your movements very well. Playing through each of the different sports in Big League Sports, I never got the feeling that the game wasn’t doing what I wanted.

The game supports up to four players competing individually for high scores, but doesn’t provide the excitement of head-to-head action.

The Review

So here’s the question, if you’re going to play a sports game, do you want only minigames, or do you want to play a full game? If your preference is for mingames, then Big League Sports might be for you.

Might be.

Might be, because it is the kind of largely generic title that a month from now you won’t even remember existed. That’s because the game, while technically competent and largely successful at the little it aims to do, does a lot of the things we have seen time and time again in the post-Wii Sports world. If you’ve managed to avoid sports minigame compilations over the past five years, you’ll find some new and interesting things here. But if you’ve played any of those games since 2007, expect more of the same.

But while the sports are represented in name, they aren’t truly there in play. Instead, each sport features three minigames pulling out key elements of each sport. In baseball, that means a home run derby, in basketball the three-point shootout, etc. If you’re committed to making minigames out of major sports, this is probably as smart and reasonable a way as you could do it, but it comes off feeling rather shallow without the ability to really play any of the games. Perhaps we’re years away from a true Kinect-enabled sports experience, but Big League Sports puts the idea in your head, and then doesn’t ever come close to that ideal.

For anyone over the age of ten, there’s going to be very little incentive to do anything more than try out each of the minigames once. You can earn and accumulate skill points in each event, or choose three events of your choice for an alleged tournament, but other than that, there wasn’t a lot of effort put into doing anything with the acceptably decent minigames. They just kind of are, and you’re expected to like them as is, rather than make even a modest attempt at wrapping a larger experience around them.

The GamerPops Recommendation

Big League Sports feels like a game that exists because someone at Activision said “we should have a minigame sports title on Kinect” and not because there was any real need or creative inspiration for it. As a result, Activision has staked its claim to the casual Kinect sports title segment with a title that is just okay. Not especially good, not especially bad. It’s just okay. I would say that short of a significant sale, this is a title that’s easily skipped, saving your valuable dollars for a game that shows not just what Kinect can do, but what Kinect can do well. Big League Sports is definitely the former, and not the latter.

A review copy was provided to GamerPops.

ESRB Rating Summary

Rating: Everyone

Content descriptors: Mild Cartoon Violence

Rating summary: This is a sports simulation game in which players compete in a variety of events (e.g., baseball, hockey, golf, soccer) to be crowned King of Big League Sports. In the hockey game, players can perform “checks” against opponents that skate into their way; opponents flail through the air amid slow-motion effects.