At the PlayStation Beta Rooms event in Birmingham last week we had the chance to go hands-on with a range of upcoming PS3 games, including Killzone3 and GT5 in 3D, plus Move Games such as The Fight: Lights Out and Sport’s Champion. We’ll be bringing you our opinions on all those games and more shortly, but in this short feature we focus on Kung Fu Rider, an off-beat PlayStation Move compatible arcade game that follows a Japanese businessman's crazy attempts to flee from a pursuing Yakuza gang.

Kung Fu Rider is another casual game from the Sony camp that should be available on PlayStation Move launch day. In the game you take the role of private detective Toby or his assistant Karin, as you try and escape from local mobsters through the busy streets of Hong Kong as you cling for you life onto an office chair. That's right...An OFFICE CHAIR.

This is a fast-paced arcade game where whizzing through the streets while sitting on a wheeled-chair is obviously far quicker than running. Using the Move controller to jump over cars, duck under railings and roundhouse kick gang members out of the way across 26 different courses, you'll get to pick up collectibles along the way and complete chains of combos and score attacks to gain a decent ranking come the end of the level. It’s a nice idea, but in reality - despite the gameplay having some retro appeal - the combination of Move, the blistering speed of careering down a slope full of obstacles, and the wide range of wand-waggling actions that you'll have to master, is enough to give you a migraine.

In a pat your head and rub your stomach type of way, the range of moves and combos that you can perform with the Move controller - wiggling it up and down to make him go faster, thrusting it forward to boost, flicking it up and down and then combining face buttons for other movements - is hard to master and not even that much fun when you do so. There's too much to think about and one slight fault messes up your co-ordination totally. We were ducking when we were meant to be jumping and doing round-house kicks when we were meant to be boosting. We were in a total mess during all of our runs...maybe we're just losing our co-ordination with age?



Or maybe we’re not quite ready for Move, or just need to spend a lot more time in its company. You see, while playing Kung Fu Rider we were yearning to get our hands on a DualShock controller because it’s actually a very good idea for a game that has its fair share of amusing moments. When you get it right with Move, admittedly you'll gain some satisfaction out of navigating some of the tricky courses, but like Sports Champions and The Fight: Lights Out, Kung-Fu Rider is just shaping up to be yet another average PlayStation Move launch game that will almost certainly lack long term appeal.