PixlBit

All of those years as a kid where you’d run around like an idiot in the backyard, pretending to be Street Fighter characters has finally paid off. PowerUp Heroes is the real world manifestation of those play time shenanigans. With the use of your trusty Kinect, you’ll be throwing hadoukens and raising the dead with simple gestures. Unfortunately, PowerUp Heroes never progresses beyond this simplicity, leaving players to execute the same basic strategies from beginning to end.

At first glance, PowerUp Heroes is an unbelievably neat experience. You fight one-on-one with an enemy that’s imbued with a specific set of magical powers. One’s a necromancer, able to deploy the dead to attack enemies, another can harness the power of the galaxy, opening black holes on the fly, while yet another can utilize fire to shield and attack in a few unique ways. These enemies all must be overcome by harnessing your own set of powers. Defeating your enemies will allow you to usurp their special abilities, like Mega Man.

When heading into a battle you’ll be forced to choose a few specific power sets to bring down the next fighter. Though the experience is similar in some ways to a 3D fighting game, it’s much less layered, focusing more on utilizing a small set of moves at effective times rather than completing consistent massive combos.

This provides for a much more deliberate battle wherein you must constantly keep an eye on your enemy. Though deliberate, the battles never feel slow nor do the controls feel as if they lag, despite the often long build up to properly execute the majority of your arsenal of moves.

As a matter of fact, controlling the game with Kinect is quite satisfying, at least for the first hour or so. While the initial hour contributes about half of the game, every few minutes you’re earning a new suit that will change your battle strategy and allow you to dole out the harshness in a fresh new way.

I was delighted to see that though a simple gesture-based game, there are some legitimate strategies that must be built to succeed. Challenging the computer brings about hints on how to execute these tactics, as they will be employed by the computer player. Want to avoid getting hit? Counter with a quick fireball, or perhaps dodge at the perfect moment. This will force the enemy to wait until their move meter refills before they can attack with the same move again.

Attacking will also require some proper timing and placement of your moves to succeed. You have to learn what attack your enemy is telegraphing and determine if you have enough time to execute your attack. You can also chain together attacks, even across the two suits you bring into battle, which feels pretty awesome to execute. Plain and simple, it's empowering to use your body to best these foes.

There are a few moves that had a tendency to be a bit finicky, like the up close encounters that are triggered by performing a kneeing motion. In the instances where you're on the defensive, blocking feels awkward, and the finishing move to push your enemy back never seemed to work as expected.

This is a minor complaint though; the real problem is that many of your gestures, across power suits, are exactly the same. Even their effect is fairly similar, which reduces some of the depth.

Once you've progressed through the campaign, there's not much left. You can battle locally and online against human players, which certainly allows you to employ more complicated tactics, but it doesn't provide for a lasting enjoyable experience, especially when you've likely grown bored of the mechanics halfway through the campaign.

PowerUp Heroes is a well-conceived concept, but one with a shallow implementation. Sure there are tactics and a number of suits, but these are learned quickly and with homogeneous gestures between suits, the gameplay starts to all feel the same. In a short hour or two, you'll feel as if you've exhausted the depth of the fighting engine and chances are you'll have also exhausted the campaign, leaving nothing but the multiplayer mode to carry the experience.