Polygon reached out to other critics also playing Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor to find out how isolated our problems with the game were. Responses varied, but some amount of struggling with the Kinect controls was universal.
"My problems were very basic: I could not get the game to work. I adjusted my seat, I adjusted the lighting, I messed with the spacing between myself and the Kinect, but I couldn't finish the tutorial before I quit out of frustration. It worked much better when I played the game at PAX, but I can only assume those conditions were nearly perfect. In the wild it's just a mess." - Ben Kuchera, The Penny Arcade Report
"Steel Battalion's Kinect integration is so fundamentally flawed that it astounds me it could have shipped like this in the first place. There's the typical "here's what Kinect is seeing" box up in the corner and it's recognizing my body perfectly but the game doesn't know what to do with that information. I don't know how many times I've reached for a button and ended up pulling down the periscope instead or somehow managed to fill the cockpit with smoke because it interpreted my movement incorrectly. My constant arm flailing left me feeling like a crazy person trying to activate my non-existent superpowers. In my brightly lit white living room with all the furniture pulled back sitting rigidly in a wooden chair, I'd say I can get the "gesture success rate" to 90%. You know what my "button success rate" is with every game ever? 99.9%. The .1% is when I spill a martini on the controller and stand up screaming "Aw shit, there goes perfectly good gin," and accidentally hit "B" by mistake." - Alex Rubens, freelance critic for G4
If my intention cannot translate reliably into the game each and every time I make an input, I'm not playing a game. I'm fingerpainting. - Julian Murdoch, Gamers With Jobs
I've seen worse Kinect games, technically speaking, but Heavy Armor still manages to annoy. Whether it's having to recalibrate your setup if you so much as twitch in your seat -- not to mention having to sit up perfectly straight in order for the sensor to properly read you -- or fumbling around on the screen while trying to do something as simple as look out the VT's view window, Steel Battalion's muddy gesture controls only exacerbate an already terrible game. Which is a shame, because Heavy Armor thinks bigger than any Kinect game in memory. - Ryan McCaffrey, IGN
