"Self Defense Training Camp" is a terrible camp counselor. Spends most of its time ignoring you.
The concept is good: Use a tutorial system with feedback to teach people self defense techniques rolled into a few exercises to help out your cardio stamina and balance. The tutorials were well designed and broken into simple enough steps that I could follow them. More than can be said for the majority of dance games on the market. The game seems you to genuinely want to know how to defend yourself; offering friendly and useful tips during loading screens, proffering videos from experts, and encouraging you to get trained by a human being.
Unfortunately, the thing that most needs self defense once I drop this disk in the tray is my Kinect! Unfortunately, the game didn't even wait for a training module to start before getting buggy. The interface of right punch accept, left punch cancel, wave your hands to change screens, was poorly thought out, as there are no controller analogs to these selections, and the free-form body recognition used by the program is terrible. I even gave the game the benefit of every doubt available to me.
I checked the lenses for cleanliness, re-ran the Kinect tuner, changed clothes several times before winding up almost buck naked in front of the stupid thing, and it still took nearly five minutes of flailing in front of the monitor to get past the title screen. Once inside, however, everything I did was a right punch. I was accepting every option even when not in front of my Kinect.
I'm led to wonder if poor programming leading to latency with the control inputs is to blame, feeding my suspicion are frame rates on the Kinect tracking screen during game play that makes the refresh rate of my bank's forty year old marquee look impressive. On a PC I have a higher tolerance for this sort of thing, But when you develop a game for a specific platform you are well aware of its capabilities and dropped frames on a game that is basically a glorified slide show with a video camera is unacceptable.
Furthermore the game constantly asks you to do things the Kinect is not designed to do. "Kick behind you." sounds like a reasonable enough request, until you try the same move inside the Kinect tuner, and find that when your leg disappears behind you, the Kinect cannot track it.
When you are trying to follow the leader during exercises, (Which always begins with a detailed explanation that you are to perform the exercises as if you were looking in a mirror.) the camera moves around to the trainer's left and right. I'm left confused, "Am I missing the moves because of timing, tracking, or because I'm failing to pivot my body as you move the camera around unannounced and without prompt?"
Yet I don't have great faith in the tracking either, as the afore mentioned menus can't seem to tell the difference between a right punch, reaching behind me for some water, or being in the kitchen eating chocolate because I'm depressed I bought a bad game.
Admittedly, my timing and rhythm is not the best, but having third parties observe has confirmed that it is not, in fact, my timing that is causing me to get poor reviews in the workouts.
The final straw that nearly made me rip the Kinect off the wall was that after a grueling 6 attempts and 50 minutes at one of the entry level self-defense tutorials, I finally achieved a five star rating which the game promptly failed to log. This was not a one-time event either. I never have gotten a chance to try the balance exercises, because after the first day the game decided it wasn't going to record my progress any more.
Sure I know what to do if an attacker grabs my wrist from any angle imaginable, I've likely performed these sets of ear-boxing, groin kicking moves more than the instructors who designed them by now! But "Self Defense Training Camp" doesn't care. "Self Defense Training camp" wants to sit in a corner by itself until I can get the time to run it back to my nearest video game retailer.