Kinect Sports Rivals proves the Xbox One Kinect still isn't serious gaming hardware

Kinect Sports Rivals is the game that should show off everything the Xbox One Kinect sensor can accomplish. It’s a first-party game, it offers a combination of sports that should be able to communicate the flexibility of the hardware and it’s a chance for Microsoft to show that it learned from the earlier mistakes of the first-generation Kinect.

We have a full review of the game ready if you want to look at the entire package — and the game does many things well — but the hardware, or quite possibly the software driving it, was not up to the task of producing a fun, working game.

I’m lucky enough to live in a house with a spacious living room, complete with hardwood floors and windows that let in plenty of natural light, but the sensor still complained about the lighting conditions. The hardware was able to accurately pick up my motions between 80 to 90 percent of the time and, while those numbers are a vast improvement from earlier Kinect games on the Xbox 360, the number of errors was still way too high for the Kinect to position itself as a reliable gaming device.