My Fitness Coach 2 (Wii)

As the true sequel to one of the first exercise game for the Wii, My Fitness Coach 2 supports a number of improvements including integration with Wii motion controls, additional play modes, and additional features such as a diet cookbook.

My Fitness Coach 2 starts out on the right foot. The new menus are clean, easy to navigate, and logically grouped. When you first create a user a number of questions are asked in order to setup a profile including current physical characteristics (such as age, sex and weight), your activity level, what foods you like and what your goals are (such as weight loss, general fitness, or flexibility). You also are able to choose between 4 different trainers and 4 different locations.

Unfortunately, once you get into the actual game everything starts to fall apart. First of all, the production values are terrible. The voice acting sounds forced, and the full motion video doesn’t blend with the backgrounds. Worse, while controls are used for feedback, they often aren’t reliable resulting in frustration as you accurately replicate the required movements only to not have it pickup anything. While some basic balance board and Wiimote integration has been done. It is clear there isn’t sufficient accuracy to correctly detect anything beyond the wiimote is moving in tempo. Perhaps (at a minimum integration) with the nunchuck (like EA Sports Active) would have yielded better results.

While there are a number of workout modes, they all basically play out the same. The only difference is the challenge modes award medals if you pass all the exercises with a sufficiently high score. Having said that, they all do a pretty good job of giving a good workout and if the controls were better the feedback given at the end would have been quite good. The other items related to diet and nutrition are pretty much throw aways. There just isn’t enough food items in the game’s library to make it a useful feature.

At the end of the day, it is hard to recommend this even over its predecessor. It’s utilization of exercise equipment was far more useful than the inept implementation of wii controller feedback and full motion video in this game.