EA Sports Active 2.0

 I've been working out for the past few months and found that my workouts were beginning to get stale.  I thought it might be nice to try a Kinect fitness program to spice things up.  While I had seen quite a few bad reviews of EA Active 2.0 for the 360, a friend of mine convinced me to buy it simply because it had online and group tracking, so that we could push each other.  We both bought it that night, but my friends resolve the got the better of him and he never even opened it.

First Impressions

Right out of the gate, the setup was quite lengthy.  It took 30 - 45 minutes just to create a character.  Most of the problem resolved around trying to go through all the setup options using the motion control of kinect.  There were simply too many buttons and menus onscreen at any one time to be effective.  Later I learned that you could use a normal controller for navigating all the menus. The first workout was good.  I did however have a few problems with detection.

The Workouts

The different activities to do in a workout are pretty varied.  It takes quite a few workouts before you've completed all the activities that it has to offer.  It does give you a good workout if you are honest.  Even with the motion detection it's quite possible to cheat or not give it you're all.  In my case it was a good distraction from becoming bored with my current workouts and helped to keep me interested.  The resistance band is low resistance, so switching that out with a set of dumbbells would be best.  It allows you substitute a weight of dumbbells before the workout or in your setup so it can presumably recalculate the calories you'll be burning.

The Good

• Wide variety of exercises.
• Tracks your heart rate, allowing you to set goals or to ensure that you are working as hard as you should.  I'm surprised at how good a motivator it is.
• Quite a few different goals and achievements help to keep me going.  Doing yet another workout to get another 20 gamerscore seems to be a good way to get me to log in.
• The Online website is not really very impressive.  It is nice to have just so you can login occasionally and see your total progress.

The Bad

• Sometimes it doesn't detect your body position.  Resulting in the user doing several pushups or side arm planks, or squats without getting credit.  Sometimes it's been bad enough that I've had to enter into a menu just to restart the exercise.  
• It pauses the workout between exercises, then doesn't recognize the user and makes them log in again.  It seems to want to use the kinect person detection before each exercise, somehow it's very paranoid that you'll tag team your wife or professional athlete in to get your workout complete and get a good score.  It's annoying and sometimes so frustrating it makes me want to turn it off and break the disc.  All that the game should be concerned with is that someone ready to workout is standing in front of it.  The developers should realize that after 20 minutes of a hard workout I am unrecognizeable even to my wife...
• It will occasionally tell you to hydrate often and take a water break.  Then not give you any break at all.  Sure, you can use the controller to pause the workout.  Which doesn't seem to interfere at all, but stopping a workout is something I don't want to do.  
• Quick workouts aren't going to happen.  By the time I turn on the 360, get into the game.. Wait for it to load up, select the workout to do, then bypass all the screens telling me about how great the workout is going to be, I would have already been on the eliptical for 10 minutes.  Do I really need to hit A everytime I load the game to acknowlege that the game uses an autosave feature?
• Achievement balance.  Ok, so I'm a little crazy on this one.  But 100 workouts is 100 Gamerscore.  That seems fair enough.  4 workouts a week, you can get that one for only 25 weeks of work, or almost half a year.  That's not so bad.  But 20 gamerscore for running 1000 kilometers..  I've spent 2 weeks to get up to less than 10 kilometers.  So in almost 4 years of constant workouts I should be able to get that achievo.  Bah.. Guess those are points that I'll leave on the table.

Overrall

I do enjoy it and would suggest it to anyone who has a kinect and wants to try something different.  I certainly would recommend trying to find a bargain on it.  The $100 it was initially priced at would be a complete ripoff, but for $40 or $50, you could do worse.  Really, it may not be any better than just getting yourself up and moving with a cheap workout DVD.