Tancap Blog

From the game’s website:

The Wii™ technology, combined with The Biggest Loser comprehensive workout and diet programs, will help you on your journey to a healthier lifestyle and to feeling great about yourself. Oh yeah, we almost forgot – you’ll have fun too!

My first impression when I saw advertisements was that this was another of the many get a license for a well known movie or video game to sell a mediocre type of game.  However, after this video review on X-Play I decided to give it a look.  Unfortunately, my initial impression was correct.

From an exercise routine standpoint, Biggest Loser is decent.  It features 66 exercises of varying intensity levels.  However even here there are some major problems.  The first and primary flaw is there is almost no flexibility in the exercise program compared to its competitors.  The amount of time for a given workout is fixed, and there isn’t an option to skip exercise or prematurely end a workout.  You also aren’t allowed to choose any goals for your exercise program other than lose a lot of weight, lose a little weight, and heart health.  The other big problem with the exercises is that the choice to restrict the Wii devices used to monitor your workout to only the Wiimote and optionally the balance board allows relatively quick transitions between exercise, but causes serious issues with the accuracy of the monitoring how well you are executing each exercise.  At times detection was laughable even when I was clearly properly executing an exercise the game would often detect that I wasn’t executing the exercise at all.

Biggest Loser also includes a health and lifestyle feature.  The health and lifestyle feature is essentially an extremely basic food diary.  Instead of including specific foods, you can only log very basic information such as light, medium, or heavy meal for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.  It also includes a relatively few healthy recipes and a tips and tricks section.  It doesn’t compare well at all to what many websites offer for free.

Finally, the “fun” part of the game is supposed to in large part originate from the challenge events.  Unfortunately, there are only a few of these and I didn’t find them as fun as the game like offerings in either EA Sports Active More Workouts or Wii Fit Plus.  Also, their are some bugs with the recording of the results that can result in you getting no credit despite placing first in the challenge.

On days when you have the challenge events you’ll also have an elimination weigh-in.  The results are not based solely on weight loss, but instead on a combination of the scores it gave your workouts, completion of diet challenges, your outside of the game activities, how close you kept to the suggested daily calorie intake, and you well you perform in the challenge event.

At the end of the day, biggest loser does nothing well and certainly nothing better than its competition.  Together with some bugs that are present, and you are left with a game that is only recommendable to those that are such big fans of the TV show that playing a game based on it would provide motivation for you continuing to use it to exercise.  The game itself is merely a checkbox affair with just enough implementation of certain features to justify it being mentioned on the box and not any care taken to properly implement or integrate them.

Scores

Graphics:

Marginal by even Wii standards.  Some videos didn’t display during testing.

Sound:

Adequate, but nothing spectacular.  Instruction is clear, but not useful at times.

Gameplay:

Lacks workout options and bug infested to boot.

Controls:

The relative minimalist approach to controls would have been acceptable except the Wiimote doesn’t work well much of the time, and balance board integration causes grading timing issues that make some exercises impossible to score well on.

Originality:

Does nothing new and does none of it very well.

Overall Singe Player:

Other than having a number of different high intensity exercises, single player will exercise your frustration almost as much as your body.

Reviewer’s Opinion:

I got suckered by X-Play’s pseudo review.  Don’t buy this.

Screenshots