I really hope this can be played with a pad. If it's kinect only, it will be a jittery, laggy, and totally unplayable train wreck of frustration.

I really hope this can be played with a pad. If it's kinect only, it will be a jittery, laggy, and totally unplayable train wreck of frustration.

I really hope this can be played with a pad. If it's kinect only, it will be a jittery, laggy, and totally unplayable train wreck of frustration.

It's a bold statement, I know, but the marriage of Kinect and controller in Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor is quite unique and, even more importantly, works well. We had concerns about the game last year, but those have disappeared.

What impressed me most during my demo mission of Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor -- a variation of the beachfront assault Alexander saw at last year's Gamescom event -- was my immediate feeling of expertise. It felt as though I had mastered this machine.

By all accounts, Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor should be a disaster. Its Kinect features require nuance and subtlelty, two things Kinect simply isn't known for. You reach up to the right to grab a box that handles ventilation and lighting controls; you place your hand down and to the left to grab the speed shifter, and pull back with force to enable sprinting. In a small corner of the screen, Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor shows me Kinect is not only tracking my head and hands, but also my shoulders and elbows and biceps.

During the panic of my beach assault, I was performing multiple actions while still accurately engaging targets near and far.

As [the enemy VT] dropped, crippled, I dealt the final blow and felt like a real badass. It all became second nature. I wasn't moving my limbs in like a puppet master, but focusing on my task.

That's the thing I can't get out of my mind: just how well it all came together from start to finish. I didn't have to put down the controller to use Kinect's gesture controls. Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor's Kinect features don't feel tacked on or convoluted. Everything was a simple, carefully designed movement that felt real -- well, as real as piloting a gigantic bi-pedal mech can feel, I guess.

The game uses the sensor to create a virtual cockpit around the player, requiring them to physically reach out to flip switches, pull levers and slug their insubordinate mech crew members in the face. The experience feels more natural than it sounds.

Heavy Armor is one of the first Kinect titles to meld the device's gesture control capabilities with the traditional Xbox 360 controller -- rather than replacing dual-stick controls with a clumsy motion experience, it augments it. Driving your mech, aiming your cannons and gunning down your enemies is a familiar, thumb dominated affair. Changing gears, pulling down your precision aim periscope or pressing the self destruct button, however, is just a surprisingly natural arm reach away. It's smooth, it's easy and, to be honest, it's a breath of fresh air. This is Kinect done right.

Kinect facilitates an unexpected new angle in Steel Battalion. This is a much more involving mech shooter than expected, and it probably wouldn't be this kind of personal experience using only a control pad.

The simple breakdown of how Steel Battalion plays is this: the controller enables aiming, shooting, and moving, while everything else relies on your body. Looking through your cockpit window and slaughtering soldiers is the core of what makes playing as a giant, walking tank fun, of course, but the way Kinect engages you outside of combat is the most interesting thing here.

Capcom's Steel Battalion might have just become the flagship game for Microsoft's motion sensing camera.

Admittedly, getting adjusted to the Kinect-enabled parts of the game take some time, but it's not because they aren't responsive. It's because you have to train your brain to move your hands and body around as if they were in an actual cockpit. For example, when you reach for the bars in front of you to pull your face to the blast window, your motions have to mimic that. To return to the default camera view in the cockpit, you have to physically push yourself away from the window with the opposite motion. It's not quite as easy as it sounds at first, but we started getting the hang of it after a dozen or so minutes.

Indeed, despite the heavy Kinect integration, movement, targeting, and shooting are still executed through the traditional first-person shooter setup and surprisingly it's not all that jarring. In fact, the transition between the cockpit and first-person view is long enough that it gives more than ample time to get readjusted, or to pick-up your controller if you happened to put it down--though, it's worth pointing out that Steel Battalion's Kinect functionality has been designed to anticipate the occasional nose itch or various other sorts of unintentional movement that would otherwise cause problems.

From just about every perspective, Steel Battalion Heavy Armor is the game that you will probably use to show off as an example of how a typically hardcore game can be used to properly harness the Kinect when it's designed specifically for it--as opposed to just adding Kinect functionality onto a game as an afterthought. We'll be seeing more of the game before its release on June 19.

@Corellianrogue You clearly don't understand the marketing behind Previews. Did anybody say AMY was god awful in previews as much as they did in their actual reviews? No actually it was quite the opposite. Previews mean jack shit. Example "Rise of Nightmares is THE hardcore game to showcase the Kinect", eh not it wasn't. You mean its not a game that is Pegi 3 for Kinect? Oh big difference and it was also a shit load of fuck.