- Original Platform: 360 Kinect
- Original release: 4th November 2010
- Available to buy: Yes


I’ll be fully honest in saying that I didn’t fully complete this game. I played the overly long tutorial, a fair amount of missions and went though the different modes and tracks.
Sonic Free Riders is the third in the Sonic Riders hoverboard racing series of games. The mechanics of this are somewhere in between the two games. Crouching for a jump and timing your jump now gets you air again, which can be used for boosting. Quarter pipes on turns can also be used for a quick boost of speed, encouraging you to do tricks instead of just turning.
Collecting rings will upgrade your gear, giving you access to speed, fly and power shortcuts. Items also make their way to standard races, letting you attack other racers. The story mode features 43 missions, and will take a while to complete. The game itself actually seems to be pretty good, with some interesting track design and plenty to do and unlock. The main issue, however is the controller.
This game exclusively uses the Kinect, which is a very fancy webcam with depth perception and infrared sensors. You have to stand in a hoverboard pose and tilt left and right to turn and jump and spin to do tricks. It sounds simple, but it really does not work well at all. I could never get tilting backwards to reliably make my character turn, often resorting to repeatedly switch sides so I was always tilting forward. Combined with spinning while jumping, it’s a very exhausting few hours.
The game also repeatedly paused itself, I could never figure out not causing it – my only guess was Kinect not being able to detect me occasionally. It’s all round a frustrating experience, although me and my fiancée had a lot of fun laughing at the sheer absurdity of the controls and how bad they are.
It really is a shame, as I think this would have been a good game with a regular controller.

Where to get:
- Xbox Marketplace (Note: Only works on Xbox 360 with Kinect – NOT backwards compatible with Xbox One/Series)
- ROM Status: Available, but no emulator supports Kinect.
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