Kinect PlayFit impressions

Following on from Kinect Fun Labs, Microsoft have just released another free app for Kinect users. This one isn’t a bunch of half-arsed ‘gadgets’ though – Kinect PlayFit tells you how many calories you’ve burned from your play sessions and awards you with achievements and avatar items.

There are 20 achievements in total, with the easiest to unlock being for burning a mere 300 calories. There’s an online leaderboard too so you can see how you stack up with the rest of the community.

A couple of things have us feeling a little disgruntled, however.

Firstly, only 10 Kinect games support the app and a few of these aren’t exactly the Kinect’s finest. Let’s Cheer and Deepak Chopra’s Leela, we’re looking at you here. Secondly, the app doesn’t rummage around your save files to see how many calories you’ve burnt so far. We’ve clocked up a fair few hours in Kinect Star Wars – one of the supported games – but our calorie burn-rate stands at zero.

Hopefully more older games will be added over time – even the original Dance Central and Kinect Sports are oddly absent from the supported list.

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