PlayStation Move Fitness Review

Dear me, where do we start with this review? With the flood of motion sensor games threatening to become a tidal wave washing over our consoles,  many of the games on offer are indeed one in a million. Others, sadly, are more likely to be won in a car boot sale. Move Fitness on the PS3 is a good case in point.  It’s been a long time since I played a game that had me gnashing my teeth, wringing my hands and cursing in languages that even I didn’t understand.  Honestly, if I could meet the person who ‘produced’ this game I would fight them in the street. Note the word ‘produced’ is in quotation marks. This is because Brash Games has strict rules on language allowed in our reviews and so I leave it up to the reader to substitute the appropriate word.

Just in case you haven’t picked up on my excruciatingly subtle approach to this review, playing Move Fitness on the PS3 is about as much fun as shoving a bees nest into your underpants. According to all the official guidance on using the Playstation Move sensors,  you need somewhere between 4 to 7 feet between you and the camera to get the most out of the Move experience. With just over 6 feet of space in my living room, we’ve had no problems playing other Move titles. Move Fitness, however,  would change all of that.

Despite being able to successfully calibrate the game during the set-up process,  almost half of the exercise routines on offer kept demanding that you ‘move back’ before it would recognise your movement. Why? And the games that did accept that we had enough room to manoeuvre, copied our movements with all the sluggishness and uncertainty of a drunken tramp wading through treacle. While this is happening you have your personal tormentor/instructor constantly barracking you with a ‘get a move on’  which did little to help things along.

Did we talk about the graphics? No? Well, lets not forget the ‘stunning’ high definition graphics. Note quotation marks. After playing the far superior Your Shape Fitness Evolved on the Xbox 360, I can say without fear of contradiction that Move Fitness fails to come close to anything we’d expect from a next gen PS3 title.  Move Fitness could make it as a polished up Wii offering, but, as a PS3 contender,  this game set its sights on mediocrity and fell woefully short of the target.

For the record, Move Fitness offers a pretty limited 28 activities – compared with EA Sports Active 2’s 70. And underlining the thin content is the woeful fact that there is no real way of measuring your physical improvements (i.e, no way of telling if the exercise is actually working). A baffling omission for a fitness orientated title.

I made a note to point out that,  on loading, there’s no immediate option for selecting a profile. As soon as the game loads, it automatically boots up into the profile that we created during set up. This does help to throw you right into the action but is a little inconvenient if someone else wants to have a go at Move Fitness but doesn’t match your size, height and age.

To summarise, nothing we’ve seen in Move Fitness will make much of am impression on you if you’ve already got a keep fit/exercise game. In fact,  if you’re really set on using Move Fitness to help with exercising,  you could use the disc as a Frisbee.  But obviously not recommended unless you have more than 6 feet of space.  Avoid.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Sony Playstation 3 code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.