Fit in Six - Game Review

Pros: Varied exercises
Cons: Painfully repetitive workouts. Fails to take advantage of the tech.

The workout game Fit in Six has pretty icons and all sorts of different workout routines, but what does it all mean? What does choosing a goal like “Free your Mind” or “Find your Balance” or “Better Body Awareness” actually mean? What do I infer from icons representing “cardio” and “balance” attached to a routine? How do they relate to my choice of workout? If this is some sort of coherent exercise system, why not explain it in the manual?

The biggest question: what does the $40 this game costs give me that I could get from an exercise DVD for $15?

The main reason to buy an exercise game, as opposed to an exercise DVD, is for the technology. Wii Fit Plus uses the balance board to watch the user’s weight distribution, allowing it to give useful feedback. EA Sports Active 2 has leg and arm monitors that allow it gauge whether you are doing the exercises correctly.

Fit in Six can use a camera if you have one plugged into your Wii, but the software doesn’t pay any attention to your image. The only point of the camera is to allow you to see yourself working out side by side with the game’s exercise avatar in see whether you are doing things right. In actual use, it is no more high tech than a mirror.

The software doesn’t even have fairly standard features like a calorie counter or a build-your-own-workout inferface. It is as though the developers have never even seen an exergame before.

What Fit in Six does have is a lot of exercises. Your virtual trainer will lead you through Pilates and calisthenics as well as more unusual routines based on kick boxing and Latin dance.

Users can choose either basic workout sets which combine a bit of this and bit of that or specific exercises like kick boxing. You repeat basic movements over and over until your muscles are very sore. I am not a fan of this approach to exercise. My own work out is a mix of social swing dancing and an exercise program from 1905 I read about in Slate that takes 20 minutes and can be done while watching television.

While there are a lot of exercise choices, some seem needlessly repetitive. Some of the dance workouts are one or two movements repeated over and over for 10 minutes. Users are told routines that combine more movements are advanced and should only be done after learning the movements in earlier routines, but these early routines don’t explain the movements any more than the later ones (as in an aerobics class, you’re simply supposed to watch and listen and figure it out), so it seems like an attempt to make it appear there is more to the software than there is.

I can’t really critique the workout routines themselves, because they are for people who like the sort of grueling, tedious workouts I hate. But I can critique the game’s basic design, which is quite poor. True, exercises are explained clearly, and there is a fair amount of variety, but there must be some sort of exercise sampler DVD that offers something similar for under $20. Fit in Six sells for $40, or $50 if you want the camera as well, and there is simply nothing in it that justifies the price. If you’ve got a Wii, you like exercise routines and you see this in a bargain bin someday for $10 you might want to try it out, but compared to the best Wii workout programs, Fit in Six falls short by almost every measure.