Outside of Track n Field, Volleyball is my favorite mode in XBox Kinect Sports. It's still Kinect style, casual, easy and fun and also has great graphics, sharing capability, online multiplayer, and great competition.
Pretty much your basic Beach Volleyball game, Bump-Set-Spike if you do it right. There is a little movement involved normally slight adjustments to front-back, left to right as well which Kinect’s sensor will guide you through if you’re out of place. Defensively you certainly will have many opportunities to jump up and get that power block right back in your opponents grill.
“Overall, Kinect Sports Volleyball is definitely fun, especially for the family or casual gamers.”
Here is our XBox Kinect Volleyball Booya Gadget YouTube Video:
There is also great local and online multiplayer. For our video demo and analysis of the game, we shot versus multiplayer mode against eachother. Because of the simple nature of the game, it was a very competitive game, final score 7-5. If you prefer to be Tom Cruise to your friend’s Goose, then you can play co-op as well.
Volleyball with Microsoft’s motion sensor also features some pretty nice graphics. I enjoy the custom entries where you get to literally wave to your fans, and of course this article’s feature image showing Booya Avatar with a pre-game reflection letting the sand trickle through his fingers. And don’t forget you can easily upload, save, and share your automatically generated in-game action photos and videos. Once complete, you can choose to upload your videos which I recommend. It is private, and sent to an account you can quickly create for free at KinectShare.com by connecting to your XBox Live account. It worked.
I was thankful to get my hands on Volleyball mode, because I personally did not care for Bowling, Boxing, or Soccer. I think families, casual gamers, and social people with frequent guests may really enjoy every game mode, however. While I certainly had fun in every mode, I don’t see myself going back to play much of any mode solo besides Volleyball and Track if I were willing to take a timeout from the Move, InFamous, and Fable III.
So overall, Kinect Sports Volleyball is definitely fun, especially for the family or casual gamers. Crank up the difficulty and you will also get a challenge. For maximum enjoyment go online, or have friends over to play some Volleyball, and see if you can’t recreate that special Beach scene from Top Gun. If you’re comparing this to the Move Sports Champions Volleyball, you will notice that Kinect’s version is much more “arcade mode”. For example, when you jump your player will definitely soar far above the net in some kind of a Super-Mario Volleyball hybrid move. So, I would match the game to your style. If you’re more hard-core, perhaps used to play some ball, then you might prefer Sports Champions. If you’re a dad-mom, youngster that just wants to have some simple, easy fun without having to get athletic training the Kinect Sports will do you just fine, and you can bump-set-spike away.