On paper, a hoverboard-based game for the Kinect sounds like an excellent idea. The technology is certainly there, but there are a lot of things to overcome for it to actually work and be fun for an extended period of time. Sonic Free Riders, a launch title for the Kinect, is Sega’s attempt to hit those notes and deliver a compelling motion-controlled racing experience.

Somewhere, brimming deep beneath the depths of tutorial hell and often-unresponsive controls, there is an enjoyable game here. Riders tries out a lot of interesting ideas that took a lot of ambition on Sonic Team’s part, but the execution more often than not falls flat. One area that Riders undoubtedly excels in is variety and content. The World Grand Prix portion of the single player mode is the main attraction of Riders, but there are also ring collecting, free play, survival, and time attack modes available. While the game definitely deserves credit for providing so many ways to play it, actually doing that is a difficult and frustrating task.

The essential control scheme of Sonic Free Riders has you standing sideways in front of your TV with one shoulder facing it, and the other facing behind you. While in this position, you must lean backwards and forwards, jump at the right times, and steer your way through the courses. It’s an exciting concept, but it doesn’t quite pan out.

The controls are occasionally functional, but they require a lot of trial and error on the player’s end. The calibration before each race can definitely help, but even that cannot save you from having to suffer through exaggerated leaning back and forth for an extended period of time. The idea behind the calibration before the race is that it is calibrating how far you are leaning, so in theory you should save yourself from having to lean too much in the impending race by being very reserved in your movements while it calibrates you. This does help a bit, but it doesn’t completely fix the problem. Even with the most subtle of movements in the calibration phase, I found myself still having to make quite a few emphatic movements for the game to acknowledge and detect what I was doing. It took me around two hours to feel somewhat comfortable with how the game played, but even then I was still having some trouble.

Due to the controls, ring-gathering missions are deviously hard.

Another issue is Riders’ occasional failure to register your movements. There were moments where I found myself leaning backward the same way I would have any other time, but my character completely ignored it and crashed into the wall. Hitting the wall is a pretty prevalent part of the experience, and one that is pretty difficult to mend. This is mostly in part to the game’s all-too-often disconnect between what you’re doing and how your character on the screen is reacting to it. There is a seriously steep learning curve at work, and one that is based more on an unresponsive control scheme than a design decision.

Every race track in the game features hidden passages and alternate routes. Most of these routes require you to have the right “gear” attached to your board before they’re accessible, which is a pain to manage. For instance, if you want to grind a rail in a level, you need to have that gear attached to your board. Each board can only hold two gears, so you need to be especially selective of which ones you choose. This adds a level of strategy to the game, but it also makes it hard to keep track of which secret passages are where and whether or not you’re able to access them.