Twister™ Mania First Impressions

Puzzle games are my addiction. Tetris, Puzzle Fighter, Bejeweled, Lumines; yes, I loved them all. So when I got the chance to play Twister™ Mania I was a little perplexed. How could a puzzle game for the Kinect work exactly? And most of all, how can this work with two or more friends?

Twister™ Mania is the little game I never expected to fall in love with. Seriously, I had an unbelievable time in a few of the modes. So, let me step back a minute. I’m getting ahead of myself again. Forgive me.

Twister™ Mania is, in essence, a puzzle game with various modes that enable you to have fun either alone or with a few buddies. A couple of the modes have you and another player try to fill as much of a shape as possible while another had you try to fit into a specific shape that’s barreling towards you a la “Hole on the Wall”. These modes were fun! We found ourselves loving to outwit each other in the shape creator mode. Sorry, I can’t seem to find a press release anywhere for this title so I’m banking off of my memory at this point. In this mode players contorted their bodies up into random shapes to stump the other players. As you can imagine, contouring you’re body into a weird shape is awesome! Everyone was forced to be a little more creative than usual.

But with every preview, Twister™ Mania did have a few glitches. For example, I had an unfair advantage because the game wasn’t picking up Harley’s presence at times. And most times the Kinect wasn’t even responding which lead to an even more fun game of “ring around the sensor”. The object of this game was for the other player to prance on front of the Kinect in order to get the game to register the person who would like to play Twister™ Mania. Once it was able to register the other player, we were once again able to enjoy outwitting each other once again!

However, we still had a great time playing! I’m willing to forgive the flaws since I was still able to enjoy the main objective of the game: building and contorting my body into weird shapes. But it’s still the developer’s job to take note and fix this before the game ships. But since I can’t seem to find any details on the game’s release, I’m certain I will keep you guys posted.

I am looking forward to adding this one to my vast party game library! And hopefully, the bugs we encountered will not make it into the games final release.