Reality Fighters Review: S**t just got real. (Real gimmicky.)

By Ben Griffin for computerandvideogames.com

After six years of Wii, where dreams of real innovation were quickly abandoned in favour of crap party games, it's difficult to convince anyone new methods of control aren't complete gimmicks. What have motion control, augmented reality and gyroscopes really brought us?

This train of thought certainly won't end with Reality Fighters. It takes a picture of your face and turns you into a beat-em-up character, with which you can fight across real-world environments - like your desk and the toilet. It's hardly Street Fighter. However, what it definitely is, is immediate.

Admit it, sometimes even the most basic motion-controlled games take a while for your caveman brain to figure out. How exactly do you sync a Wiimote? Exactly how many increments do you need to step back from your Kinect before you're standing on the windowsill?

Not so with Reality Fighters. Like all PS Vita launch games trading on crowd-pleasing novelty, it's shallow and it knows it. So its gimmick needs to be damn good.

SCAN HAMMER

And it is. Scanning in a face to fight with is quick and painless, making Rainbow Six Vegas' antiquated method feel like slamming your head in a photocopier. With the front and back camera you can either snap a shot of yourself or take one of a friend, and mercifully there's no positioning yourself at an acute angle, to the refracting point of light, to stop yourself from looking like Tony Montana. A click of the left trigger saves your sneer, which is then slapped onto either a male or female fighter instantly. It's ridiculously straightforward, the language of the PS Vita rolling right off your thumb.

Scanning done? Congratulations, there's now a naked character on your screen wearing your face. Step inside your wardrobe. It's filled with clothes and accessories for feet, legs, arms, hands, torso, face and head, with 50-100 options in each category. Fight in a pimp hat or with a massive banana skin on your head. Clothe yourself in a lime green Borat mankini or a Ninja Turtle Shell. Lace up some lobster mitts, then pull a tartan skirt over jester boots. Unlike ModNation Racers: Roadtrip, you can't pick your own colours, and there's no layering, but there's definite room to make an Iron Man or Godzilla.

And if you're not partial to clothing, there's a variety of body tweaking to do. Make yourself obese, skinny or muscle-bound, decorate your follicles with mullets, afros and dreads, or grow a handlebar moustache. And then it gets really interesting. Using the Vita's in-built microphone, you can record your own entrance shouts and victory cries. You're limited to around three seconds - sadly not enough time to record the entirety of 'Eye of the Tiger', but there's just enough time to say "I WILL FIGHT YOU NOW".

POETRY IN MOTION

Finished? A second congratulations to you, because you've just seen most of what the game has to offer. More than half the fun is playing around with your face and dressing up in women's clothes because the 'Reality' part is a hell of a lot better than the 'Fighting' part. This was to be expected, and it was never going to offer the depth of BlazBlue or the balance of Street Fighter. With a flashy but limited move list, it's an arcade scrapper, pure, simple, and not to be taken seriously. The officially licensed head of Mr. Miyagi should attest to that.