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Heavy Armor might be the perfect Kinect game, or at least, the most honest, because it reveals how interesting life can be when technology gets in your way. Green-lighted way back when Kinect was known as Project Natal, the game posits a near-future in which a silicon-guzzling microbe has devoured every computer on the planet, setting back the science of combat to roundabouts the close of the first world war. Deprived of GPS, drones and other decadent trappings of 21st century warfare, the Earth's nations are obliged to duke it out in gas-powered mechs or "vertical tanks" that handle as elegantly as elephants in high heels. The practical consequence for the player is that mechanics and features we take for granted, such as scanning a minimap, are either absent or an absolute bloody chore, as you poke at crackly CRT displays, crank handles and generally do your best not to fall flat on your front bumper. It's a suspiciously ironic choice of supporting fiction for a Kinect title - joined at the hip to a peripheral that was billed as a revolution in how games are played, but which has, by and large, just made games much harder to enjoy.
There's only so much credit you can give From Software's writers on this count, however. Heavy Armor was conceived alongside the original and more expensive version of Kinect, which sported a standalone processor, so labelling its unwieldiness a cheeky commentary on Kinect's impotence is a step too far - the plain truth is that it was developed to run using a more capable device. But that premise remains a charming, playful response to what's supposedly a problem of technology, and if Heavy Armor is a failure in many other respects, it's a courageous one. At a time when most other Kinect developers were quietly introducing controller support, or divesting their work of challenge to make up for recognition issues, only From Software could have put together a game in which you fight the controls as ferociously as you do your enemy.
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