Sonic Free Riders

Sonic Free Riders is a racing game in which characters from the Sonic universe compete on futuristic anti-gravity boards across tracks full of shortcuts, tricks, and obstacles. It was the third entry in the Sonic Riders series and also the only one to fully abandon the classic gamepad in favor of motion control, which marked a sharp departure from the previous two games in the series, which used a standard controller and offered a more elaborate system for upgrading boards and tricks. Like the previous entries in the series, Free Riders also divided its tracks by terrain into air, ground, and water sections, between which the characters smoothly switched to the matching type of board while racing.

The game was released as an Xbox 360 exclusive, one of the launch titles for Kinect, and its entire control scheme was built on body motion tracking with no controller in hand at all - the player steered direction by leaning their torso, jumped by crouching, and activated tricks and special abilities with a wave of the hand. This concept was ambitious for its time and demonstrated what Kinect was meant to offer, but the motion tracking was imprecise, and players often complained about a noticeable delay between their body's movement and the character's reaction on screen, which made precise maneuvering difficult, especially in faster, more technical sections of the tracks. The lack of an option to play with a classic controller also put off a portion of fans of the series' previous entries, who preferred the more precise and faster control of a joystick, and the game became a symbol of the overblown hopes placed in early Kinect. Contemporary reviews ranked it among the worst-rated titles from Kinect's early lineup, which fed skepticism among core gamers toward motion control in the racing genre.

Why play: An oddity mainly for collectors and fans of the early Kinect era who want to experience firsthand what a period attempt to bring arcade racing to purely motion-based control looked like - though even with hindsight, the game never reaches a smooth and precise experience.