Power Up Heroes is a Kinect super hero fighting game developed and published by Ubisoft. It’s a third person over the shoulder fighter that uses the player’s profile Avatar as their fighter. The game starts out with the evil super villain Malignance attempting to invade Earth on a quest for ultimate power. A hero named Volta came to Earth to try and stop Malignance but before he had the chance he was hurt and gave his powers to the nearest person, which happens to be the player. In the process of all of this emitters were scattered across Earth which give people super suits which grant certain powers.

The first mode in the game is the Campaign story mode. There is very minimal story in this mode, similar to arcade mode in a lot of other fighters. The player is given the choice between choosing which opponents they want to fight which also gives the player a chance to go back and choose another enemy to fight if one is too hard for them. Once you defeat an enemy you take their emitter/suit and you can use their powers in future fights. Your avatar also levels up with each win and can unlock additional helmet powers that grant things like more punch damage or defense. The campaign isn’t very long to be honest, at the most it would take 3 hours to complete.

Fighting in Power Up Heroes requires movement of the whole and can be very tiring. There are two basic attacks that every suit has, a blast launched from the hand by a punching motion and a charging combo attack initiated by a kick. The combo attack lets the player charge an enemy and throw a series of punches and kicks along with a finisher for extra damage. Each suit has 3 special abilities that are executed through two step poses such as jumping in the air to stomp the ground and bring a boulder, then a punching motion to punch the boulder into an enemy. These special moves are really telegraphed though and take some time to perform so if you see an enemy do it they’re really easy to dodge or counter. Each special attack has a cooldown period so a player can’t just spam the same attack. During each fight players can have 2 suits that they can switch on the fly so there is chances for chaining together interesting combinations.

Power Up Heroes features up to 20 suits for players to collect. In reality there are really just 10 suits with X versions of them with a new power. The suits in the game all look very cool though and their powers are cool to watch. My only issue with a lot of the special moves and attacks that the suits have is they seem to do similar amounts of damage and take a similar amount of time to perform. The suits have different stats but I couldn’t really tell if they made much of a difference. A couple of the suits in the game are actually suits of characters from other Ubisoft games. There is a Rabbit suit from the Raving Rabbids games and there is an Ezio suit from Assassin’s Creed. These special suits look awesome and are fun to play with.

Along with campaign mode there are Versus, Tournament, Practice and Online modes. Versus mode lets two people fight split screen against each other. Tournament mode lets 3-4 people battle it out to see who is the best. Practice mode can be used to let the player practice moves, chains and combos to improve their game. Online contains Quick Match and Ranked Match options depending on if you want to play seriously or not. Online fights seemed to work just fine for me which is a big plus when it comes to fighting games.

Power Up Heroes is a surprisingly fun fighter. I can see this game being perfect for families and people that are fans of super heroes. While the game isn’t really deep and the campaign is short I can see this being a good party game. If you’ve wanted to play a responsive fighting game for Kinect then this is definitely one of them. After a few fights in a row I felt exhausted like I really was in a fight and it felt good, so if this sounds like an experience you’re looking for then definitely pick the game up.

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