I played this at a friend's house a long time ago and even then i thought it was really dreadful. I legitimately don't think it's possible to make a good Kinect game that wasn't basically a glorified Eyetoy game. The Wiimote gave us Resident Evil 4 Wii, Sin and Punishment II, Mad World, Red Steel 2 and No More Heroes. PS Move i suppose at least had PlayStation Home and a few lightgun games. Kinect gave us the worst Sonic Riders and Steel Battalion games possible and singlehandedly killed both franchises.

Also, even with the No-Kinect patch it's very mid, if anything it honestly kills the novelty and just feels like a worse Zero Gravity sequel.

Ok, listen, this game is great. While I have never been a fan of the Sonic riders franchise, I still can appreciate how fun some of the levels are.
This game is great in all sorts of stuff. It looks great, it sounds great, the level design is great, the boss fights are great, EVERYTHING IS GREAT.
There’s just a teensy weensy problem: You can’t play the fucking game.
It is impossible to make Sonic MOVE a single centimeter. You cannot turn, you cannot jump, you can’t do shit.
And I don’t know if you know this, but in order to play the game, you have to actually y’know, control the character.
It’s physically impossible to do anything in this game and for that reason, this is the worst video game of all time.
And it’s a real shame.

What would it feel like to be speed of light
And rule the night and day
Watch as it passes by, you're mad to try
But they just can't keep up
Into the free, into the me
Into the ever knowing
Felt so refrained, felt so constrained
But now i'm breaking out and
I'm falling free in the wind, in the wind
Free to be me in the wind, in the wind

Beg, borrow, steal, you make a deal
And with no hesitation
Crawl, walk, or run, you've had your fun
Of which is very certain
Into the free, into the me
Into the ever knowing
Felt so constrained, felt so to blame
But now i'm breaking out and
I'm falling into the free, to the free
Free to be me, I am free, I am free

This game has such lousy, inconsistent controls that it's absolutely impossible to find any enjoyment in the few things it gets right. There's clear thought put behind the track designs and equipment you can purchase in the store, plus it's the first HD title in the Riders series, so you'd think that alone would be a strong selling point. However, all of it is for naught if you're dealing with one of the most unresponsive games out there, featuring mandatory full body motion controls. You don't even need to be an hour in for the feelings of sheer frustration to take over, once you start up this game you'll quickly realize that it's not the game's difficulty or other players online which are your biggest obstacle, but the controls alone. It doesn't help that the story mode ranges from mediocre to outright bad. So yes, while not everything is as terrible as the gameplay, anything positive you could say about this game is hardly noteworthy and completely overshadowed by its flaws. The worst offense of Sonic Free Riders though is how it managed to singlehandedly ruin the Sonic Riders series and give it one of the most shameful final entries to a series it has yet to redeem itself from.

Some games are just flatout bad by design, but then you have those games hampered by factors other than the core design. Sonic Free Riders is one of those games, in particular a good game locked behind an extremely poor control scheme. Take away the agony of the Kinect sensor then... and there's a real fun game lying underneath. Perhaps not as fastpaced and mechanically deep as the first Riders game, but trades blows with Zero Gravity for 2nd place. There's things I like more about each, but I'm pretty happy with saying that once you free Free Riders, it's a pretty enjoyable experience.

Oh also, playing the mod on real hardware still requires you to have the Kinect hooked up, so when the credits rolled I got a "And Thank You" type message with a picture of my chair and fan... lol. The real MVPs of my playthrough for sure.

The death sentence of what was shaping to be one of the coolest racing game series ever, a complete disgrace and an utter shame things ended up this way.

I often wonder how this game would be on proper controls, it's so hard to tell because the kinect was so awful that I can't even remember any other aspect of this game and I sure as hell won't be coming back to it for that reason. Personally I believe it should have a chance to be played on controller but I seriously doubt they'll ever touch this game again and I don't blame em

I'm not even gunna follow my usual format, I'll just cut straight to the case.
Sonic Free Riders is the worst game I have every beaten by a very wide margin. This game brought me quite literally to tears when I played it for the first time.
I'll skip to the only redeeming factor of this game: the soundtrack. And even then, it's at a lower point for Sonic standards. Other than the intro song, which is okay, nothing stands out.
The presentation is lazy. I wouldn't be surprised if the cutscenes were legitimately made in Microsoft PowerPoint. This would be excusable if it were on the DS or an early Wii title, but this game released on the Xbox 360 in 2010, halfway through the console generation! Sonic Unleashed had been out for 2 years, and hell, Sonic Colors came out not long before, on inferior hardware, no less! The cutscenes wouldn't even be hard to make, as it's mostly the characters just standing around anyway!
The writing is just kinda there. There aren't any particularly noteworthy parts, but considering Sonic Colors exists, it could be much worse. However, because there isn't much memorable, there isn't much to take out of it, which is a bad thing in my eyes.
All that, though, are nothing. The gameplay itself is why I despise this game so much. This game is the only game I have ever played that was physically painful to play. You need to bend your back backwards to turn, which already isn't very comfortable. What makes it worse is how the controls were both delayed and inconsistent. So you could be bending your back and jack diddly is happening. Or the Kinect forgets your foot exists and doesn't register your boost. Or the fact you did a trick. Or the fact that you're crouching. These shitty controls wouldn't be an issue if you could use a controller and this was only a side game, but no, Kinect only, bitch.
I forced myself through the entire game. Please, for the love of god, don't. This game makes Sonic 06 look like goddamn The Last of Us, and makes Sonic Chronicles look like Mother 3.
1/10. I very rarely even dislike a game. I enjoy games even when they're factually terrible. When a game makes me genuinely tell you to avoid even owning it, you know it fucked up badly.

The No Kinect Patch turns this game from a dogshit mess with probably one of the worst control schemes ever made, into an actually decent racing experience. It's crazy the world of difference being able to play on controller instead of shitass Kinect makes. With that said, this is still the worst Sonic Riders game even with an added patch. The courses are basically glorified Kinect gimmicks and they'd honestly feel completely lifeless if you removed all the gimmicks. Not to mention the story is still boring. There's no memorable cutscenes or cinematics and it plays out entirely like a low-budget VN. That being said, I did have fun. Going back to get S Ranks on every mission in order to unlock Super Sonic was a pretty fun challenge especially with the game's somewhat unique Trick and Air systems.

I'm keeping this at a 1 star because I don't think a mod should have any bearing on what the base game should've been. Especially if that mod is the thing making it actually playable. With the mod, this goes up to a solid 3.5 star experience.

This is unironically one of the worst games I've ever played in my life, a literal disgrace to the Sonic Riders franchise. Literally unplayable. I have no fucking idea what they were thinking when they released the game in this state. I've played kinect games that function before, Rabbids Alive & Kicking is rather fun actually, but this game? Nothing is fun, because nothing is playable. 20 dollars was spent on this game and I probably would've been better off if I just chose to use that 20 bucks on the Taco Bell across the street.

lol don't play this
the story doesn't exist, there's not really any purpose or reason as to why any of the characters are interacting with each other between races and the gameplay uses the kinect and barely works as kinect games do. Turning requires you to lean to and fro which seems intuitive but because this is the kinect we are talking about here it barely works and hurts your back as you lean way too much in hopes that MAYBE the kinect will actually see what you are trying to do. I literally got covid after playing this game im not joking it's cursed. If there is one thing I can say positively about for this game its that the world environments for the tracks look nice and use the HD xbox hardware quite well but besides that theres not a lot positive I can say here. It's a racing game where you can barely turn.