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Kung-Fu LIVE is a very unusual game – YOU are placed within the game as a character in a comic book, where you have to fight your way through hordes of baddies by actually punching and kicking rather than using a controller. Sound familiar? Well, it should as the principles behind Kung-Fu LIVE are pretty much exactly the same as the principles behind Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral. Only this doesn’t cost £130. So how does does it measure up?

For starters, there are one or two technical limitations to the PS Eye hardware that restrict the ease of playing Kung-Fu LIVE. Some people have reported real problems in setting up and calibrating the game but to be honest, apart from my feet disappearing from time to time, I found setting up the game to be pretty straightforward. I suppose it depends on the layout  and lighting of your living room, but in my rather small house I still managed to set everything up and start playing the game in just a few minutes. The initial problem I found was that my legs blended in with the sofa behind me, so they didn’t appear on screen. I solved this by laying a towel over the sofa and hey presto my legs were back! If you’re setting this up in a small bedroom then you may struggle but you should find that an average size living room is more than sufficient. You need good lighting, so in addition to your main light if you have a bright lamp handy it would be a good idea to add it to your play area.

That's actually me in there

The game is presented as a comic book that you star in, so in keeping with this the game asks you to pose for a series of photos before each level. Your poses are then transferred into the comic book itself while the story is told via cutscenes. This is a nice touch that adds to the level of immersion of the game and it’s pretty fun making stupied poses before seeing how they’re integrated into the comic.

Once you’re into the game itself the fun really begins. You are attacked one at a time to begin with, followed by multiple assailants later on. There’s no need to use a controller at all once the game is underway, and you start by puching and kicking your enemies until their health bar runs down to nothing. The kicks in particular are very satisfying to pull off, and are usually accompanied by some pretty funky old-school sound effects that sound like something from a Jackie Chan movie. There are more than just the basic moves though, you can pull off double punches, jumps, back-flips, lighting, groundshakers and all kinds of martial arts nonsense. Some of the basic moves are represented 1-to-1 by what you do and others are generated by ‘gestures’ – for example, jumping 30cm off the ground and pushing your hands back over your head will cause your character to perform a backflip.

The combat is generally fun and satisfying, though occasionally there are problems that mean you don’t move in the way you want to and end up missing your target or end up taking a swift one to the face. The first few baddies you fight are are pretty simple but as the game progresses you’ll find tougher and tougher opponents who block most of your attacks and require different tactics to simply smashing your fists around as fast as possible. However, as the game starts to require more advanced tactics and movements, the control problems are exacerbated and the game does become quite frustrating as you find yourself unable to pull off the techniques you want to. Aside from these problems, it really is much more fun that you’d think to be kicking and punching thin air like a maniac. The levels themselves are varied and well drawn, if quite 16-bit looking, and the game is presented in a slick manner that suits the content perfectly.

If the game worked well 99% of the time it would be fantastic but I found it only worked well about 75% of the time, which is a real shame. I imagine that if you had the perfect set up with a bright plain wall behind you, the game would be immense fun but as it stands, it’s only worth playing for about 15 minutes at a time. There are some excellent concepts in Kung-Fu LIVE and if there PS Eye hardware were up to the standard of Kinect then it would be an essential purchase for any open-minded gamer. Considering how cheap and old the PS Eye is, it still manages to perform well for much of the time though, and for these moments it is worth playing Kung-Fu LIVE. It’s not for everyone, and you will need to gauge the suitability of your living room before going any further, but if you want a quick bit of quirky fun from a (relatively) cheap PSN game then Kung-Fu LIVE might be just the ticket.