I'll have to give this review as a gamer with no experience with health sciences.
The Ring Fit is a gimmick that could have been significantly worse, expensively impractical or actively harmful. Instead, it's a fun and productive way to be physically active.
Ring Fit Adventure does a good job at engaging with exercises, doing check-ins with the player, and offering advice and affirmations. It's not the most exciting or interesting RPG/Adventure game outside of its controllers, but it does enough to keep me coming back to it or going beyond the game and actually running in my neighbourhood.
The game provides direct feedback to your movements based on its motion controls, that seem to be fairly accurate. Although, there seems to be a couple of occasions where the UI demonstrates an exercise slightly differently from how your character performs them, or an odd bug that confused left and right for a stretch - there can definitely be problems with the audio cues not syncing with the actual gameplay.
Once in a while, the game throws new and fun mechanics in. There's a leveling system that opens up new exercises, and some of the levels change between being the adventure run-and-gun then fighting creatures using a move set, to competitive arenas focusing on one move set, or throwing something completely new mid-level - like running away from birds! This doesn't happen too frequently, but it's a pleasant surprise when these things pop into the game.
In between play sessions, the game offers decent health advice, encouragement and affirmations, they're always supportive without shaming. The game appropriately shows progression as a motivator to come back, and its asks about changing the difficulty - sometimes it even asks if its asking too many questions!
This is all fine in its neat package - except a couple of problems that really make me sour on the game.
There's very bad pacing in the game. Instead of consistency, there's a lot of downtime as it calculates scores, loads levels, or goes through the visual-novel aspect of the game where NPCs are talking. When a workout could have been 15 minutes, getting in to the game and going through the equivalent workout could take up to 25 or 30 minutes. The downtime isn't exactly paced when the player would want to break for water or catch your breath as it's usually before stretching or before actually working out throughout a level.
While the sound cues are very good and sometimes the only reliable way to do some exercises, the music is repetitive and horrendous. There's no way to turn it down or off and replace it with your own workout music. This is its biggest fault really, as I load up the game to do another daily workout, I'm immediately deflated and not excited to get in to it simply because of how often I hear the same short loops of boring and bad music. Granted, it is a major relief while continuing through the game to occasionally be greeted by a different musical track than usual. Unfortunately, this is rare.
I still recommend this though, but am looking for ways to actually play through it differently - having music or a podcast playing behind me seems to be more helpful.
The Ring Fit is a gimmick that could have been significantly worse, expensively impractical or actively harmful. Instead, it's a fun and productive way to be physically active.
Ring Fit Adventure does a good job at engaging with exercises, doing check-ins with the player, and offering advice and affirmations. It's not the most exciting or interesting RPG/Adventure game outside of its controllers, but it does enough to keep me coming back to it or going beyond the game and actually running in my neighbourhood.
The game provides direct feedback to your movements based on its motion controls, that seem to be fairly accurate. Although, there seems to be a couple of occasions where the UI demonstrates an exercise slightly differently from how your character performs them, or an odd bug that confused left and right for a stretch - there can definitely be problems with the audio cues not syncing with the actual gameplay.
Once in a while, the game throws new and fun mechanics in. There's a leveling system that opens up new exercises, and some of the levels change between being the adventure run-and-gun then fighting creatures using a move set, to competitive arenas focusing on one move set, or throwing something completely new mid-level - like running away from birds! This doesn't happen too frequently, but it's a pleasant surprise when these things pop into the game.
In between play sessions, the game offers decent health advice, encouragement and affirmations, they're always supportive without shaming. The game appropriately shows progression as a motivator to come back, and its asks about changing the difficulty - sometimes it even asks if its asking too many questions!
This is all fine in its neat package - except a couple of problems that really make me sour on the game.
There's very bad pacing in the game. Instead of consistency, there's a lot of downtime as it calculates scores, loads levels, or goes through the visual-novel aspect of the game where NPCs are talking. When a workout could have been 15 minutes, getting in to the game and going through the equivalent workout could take up to 25 or 30 minutes. The downtime isn't exactly paced when the player would want to break for water or catch your breath as it's usually before stretching or before actually working out throughout a level.
While the sound cues are very good and sometimes the only reliable way to do some exercises, the music is repetitive and horrendous. There's no way to turn it down or off and replace it with your own workout music. This is its biggest fault really, as I load up the game to do another daily workout, I'm immediately deflated and not excited to get in to it simply because of how often I hear the same short loops of boring and bad music. Granted, it is a major relief while continuing through the game to occasionally be greeted by a different musical track than usual. Unfortunately, this is rare.
I still recommend this though, but am looking for ways to actually play through it differently - having music or a podcast playing behind me seems to be more helpful.