I LOVE these types of games! Thanks for the bump! I try to play at least the demos for all of these because I too am enamored with the idea of gamifying working out. As with all of these, you get what you put in, so even if you can kinda cheat the game, remember you’re not cheating the game you’re cheating yourself.
DDR is the classic, can’t go wrong with it. You can also use dance pads with Crypt of the Necrodancer and Step Mania on PC! Just Dance is really the same thing but uses your arms too.
Ring Fit Adventure is one of my favorite games of all time (spoilers for this year’s sight and sound poll) and definitely the best fitness game out there. The gamification is quite good and I think it offers the most variety of any of any fitness game out there. There’s even an offline mode and rhythm minigame. The main quest is like 30-40 hours, and I’m still in New Game + mode after 65 hours with it. One note – I think it gave my joy con stick drift. I pride myself with being very gentle with my joycons and still use the ones that came with my controller 6 years ago but I think from shaking the ring it developed it. If you have broken joycons its the perfect game to use it with, but it could ruin ones that are perfectly fine.
As far as games with demos… A new one came out recently, Fitness Circuit! It’s neat, I think it has some good new ideas and works out some body parts that Ring Fit doesn’t. It gamifies things in a pretty good way. One note, I think it’s pretty easy to cheat and sometimes doing the moves correctly doesn’t register, but they really shot for the fences with it so I appreciate it. I haven’t bought it, but I have been thinking about doing so since I played the demo.
Next is Fitness Boxing, Fitness Boxing 2, and Fitness Boxing Fist of the North Star edition. It’s good, but there’s pretty limited amount of movement with it. It can really only tell if you’re doing jabs, uppercuts, and hooks and to be honest, you can cheese it pretty easily. But if you take it seriously, 16-23 minutes a day while listening to podcasts or music of your choosing, you can burn a few extra calories. I felt like the ‘10 minutes a day’ mode was not enough, and 30 minutes a day was a little too repetitive. Your body will get used to the movements quickly, so might want to change it up if you feel like you aren’t breaking a sweat. Also, all 3 games are the same.
Knockout Home Fitness and Lets Get Fit are kind of mediocre compared to the above. Probably better than a lot of older games but doesn’t really stack up. With Yoga Master Deluxe, Zumba, etc, I feel like you might as well just watch a fitness video rather than play a game. And on that note - there are a lot of really good free videos for yoga, pilates, circuit workouts, etc. that are fun, and you can play video games in between sets.
I also integrate the exercise bike into my gaming. For example recently I’ve been playing Final Fantasy V while on the bike, and it’s great for those mindless grinding through an RPG. Just don’t go overboard, when I played Tales of Arise a few years ago, I think the flashing lights combined with my high pulse rate, I started seeing spots haha.
