Zumba Fitness

The root cause is a general failing of the game and the hardware to make a convincing case at any point that it's competently following your movements. A traffic-light system - where the on-screen dancer you follow changes colour - is employed to indicate the accuracy of your movements, which is fine in theory, but proves woefully inaccurate in reality.

The design pulls the experience in competing directions, between the fun of Dance Central and the finesse of Your Shape's body capture, with Zumba Fitness falling weakly in-between.

At launch, developers knew Kinect could not translate body movement on screen with the same speed as a controller: the faster the movement, the more pronounced the delay seems to the player. Dance Central worked around this issue with a degree of flair, while Your Shape succeeded, on a technical level at least, because it focused on slower movements.

Zumba Fitness, in short, never feels like a truly interactive experience on Kinect. As a result, all the encouragement the game barks at you during a session rings hollow, which makes it a poor motivator.

Similarly, while workouts can be planned in a calendar, no useful data is tracked or analysed, giving no meaningful sense of improvement beyond the frequency of your sessions.

Various modes offer some variety. There are multiplayer dance-offs in Zumba Attack, for instance, for two players head-to-head or four alternating in teams of two. While it's always more fun to be prancing alongside someone else, the tracking problems undermine any sense of genuine competition.

Online multiplayer offers a promising glimmer of hope, allowing you to join a session at random or create your own for others to join and dance together. Sadly, in all the times I've tried to make this happen over Xbox Live, I've never once managed to connect to another player.

That you are also pointed towards Zumba.com to find a real class suggests that Zumba fans would rather do it for real than over the internet, buying the game because of brand appeal and the opportunity to practise at their leisure.

What I fail to see here, if your goal is improved fitness, is what the appeal of Zumba Fitness is over a traditional workout DVD.

It's not all bad. Though unlicensed, the music is pleasingly cheesy and infectious; and the Just Dance-y visuals are bright and appealing. The only time you appear on screen is in stylised boxes in the background that only offer partial visibility of your silhouette. Given the huge lag in replicating your movements, it is undoubtedly for the best, but at the same time it highlights the game's failings as a serious fitness title.

That said, Zumba Fitness works you bloody hard. Setting aside the inaccuracy of Kinect, the workouts themselves are frantic, varied, ridiculous, challenging and, yes, often hilarious fun - particularly with an audience, though that's not really the point.

The longer routines left me exhausted and sweat-drenched, but still grinning - so I can certainly see the appeal of Zumba over traditional fitness classes or boring old regular exercise.

What I fail to see here, if your goal is improved fitness, is what the appeal of Zumba Fitness is over a traditional workout DVD or, as I noted earlier, one of the wealth of videos online (a YouTube search for "Zumba" brings up 78,300 results).

And that, in the end, is what marks Zumba Fitness out as a lacklustre offering and missed opportunity. It may be fun and it may make you sweat, but as an interactive fitness companion it's a feeble, infuriating effort that lacks the stamina to compete.