It’s probably too late to prepare my insides for swimsuit season.
If you have a Nintendo Switch and want to keep fit or get fit, you have plenty of good options. there is ring shaped adventurethree fitness boxing games (including this year’s) Fitness Boxing Fist of the North Star), several Just dance titles, and nintendo switch sports if you really get into it. Those are the ones you’ve probably heard of. If you really dig into the Switch catalog, you can find less mainstream but equally effective games like let’s get in shape and Yoga teacher.
There’s just no shortage of games available that will get you off the couch and into a fitness routine, and fitness circuit is yet another option.
fitness circuit (Change)
Developer: EXFIT, Jupiter
Publisher: Spike Chunsoft
Release: May 26, 2023
MSRP: $49.99
There are some great ideas at play in fitness circuit. The exercise concept at the heart of the game is Super Circuit Training, where you alternate between cardio and strength training. Each day you log in after creating your profile, you’ll be presented with a personalized exercise routine that ties in with your goals. The routine will combine cardio and strength activities, each asking players to exert themselves for approximately 45 seconds to a minute. At the end of your routine, you will have a minute of rest to hydrate before repeating the exercises. If you don’t have enough time, you can choose to do your daily routine only once, but there is an option to do it multiple times.
As with 2021 Knockout Home Fitness, fitness circuit it is aimed at people who are already in shape or at least not completely out of shape. I’m somewhere in the middle, which means I had no trouble keeping up the speed of the routines as I finished each training session drenched in sweat. And not in a sexy way. It took me about a week to get used to the program, but once I increased my runs through my daily training routine to three, I began to understand the effectiveness of the alternate strategy.
Cardiovascular exercises are designed to keep your body moving. You’ll be doing heel touches, kicks, punches and other moves that wouldn’t be out of place on a Richard Simmons treadmill. Strength exercises are usually slower and usually force you to hold a position while stretching your muscles. There are 45 exercises in total, but not all of them feel equally effective. Cardio exercises like the March and Butt-Kick really didn’t feel like working out. But they were effective enough to give my body a break in between the more impactful strength exercises. One thing to note is that the game will say you train for “10 minutes a day”, but between your pre-workout stretch and post-workout cooldown, you should give yourself at least half an hour to play.
As with other fitness games, you won’t go through this alone. fitness circuit has six trainers, voiced by anime voice actors like Emi Lo, Mick Lauer, and Amber May. These trainers can be customized with new outfits that you unlock as you level up. Technically, the trainers are not trainers but runners. In the game, they compete in events at Extreme Park, which is basically a sci-fi version of american gladiators. The better you do in your exercises, the faster they will complete their courses. This might have been a good idea if there had been time and money to fully explore it, but the inclusion of Extreme Park here is simply a justification for them to play lots of different sports in a futuristic setting.
I haven’t been paying attention to the sports my runner is involved in because I’m too focused on getting the moves right. fitness circuit it has an easy to understand guide for all the movements you need to do for each exercise. Get the move right and you’ll get a “cool” rating. Doing it even slightly correctly will result in a “pass”, while not doing the exercise correctly will result in a “failure”. At least, that is the intention. Because during the last 10 days of playing this game, I found that it doesn’t always accurately follow your movements.
I got “ok” grades where I know I should have gotten “great”, and there should be no reason I would ever get a “fail” on any of these exercises. You can know when the game fails to capture your movements. Each movement track has little stars that you collect. The joy-con controllers gently vibrate with each one you get. If your controllers aren’t vibrating, you’re not reading their movements correctly. You can make small adjustments to your movement to get a better read, but unless the controller is held completely still, there’s no reason for a player to get hit with a “miss”. It’s not like the controls are accurate enough to tell if I’m not moving my arms at a perfect 90 degree angle.
One intriguing feature that I unfortunately didn’t get to test is online multiplayer. You and up to three friends who also own the game can compete in different workouts. This isn’t available locally, but working out with a friend is a great way to keep up. Multiplayer is only available in custom circuit mode, where you can create your own routines or use ready-made ones using exercises you’ve unlocked. I’ve never been good at creating my own routines (probably that’s why wii fit didn’t work for me), so ready-made circuits are welcome. The one I’ve been using regularly is called Back Pain 1, and I’m really starting to feel its effect. If there are certain parts of your body that you don’t want to exercise, or if you don’t have the best balance there is, fitness circuit allows players to exclude any exercises they do not want to do.
There are some weird localization issues where the text doesn’t match what’s happening on the screen, and the audio could be better at guiding players when their faces are turned away from the screen. But beyond that and the aforementioned tracking issues, fitness circuit it’s a well rounded package. If you’re looking for your first fitness game on Switch or have grown tired of all the others, consider it an effective way to stay active every day.
[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]
