Shovelware ahoy! With the launch of a brand new form of gaming for your living room, it is of course inevitable that, in amongst the good stuff, a stream of crap will follow, ready to milk that cashcow for all it's worth. Enter Fighters Uncaged, the worst game about punching and kicking the air we've ever witnessed.

Nothing is too mediocre for this flail-em-up, with its horrible visuals and complete lack of actual gameplay. Whereas other fighting games play around with blocking, dodging, tactical movements and stamina, Fighters Uncaged instead pretends to embody all these elements, when in actuality you can simply stand on the spot and swing your arms over and over again to complete the entire game. When you're already utterly bored halfway through the tutorial, you know this isn't going to be the experience of a lifetime.

You have to beat this guy up eight times before the game will let you actually play

Fighters Uncaged puts you in the role of some guy with the most annoying voice imaginable and asks you to swing your arms and legs around in order to knock out a stream of personality-less baddies in bland environments. Before you can do any of that, however, you need to first take part in the most outrageously tedious tutorial we have ever encountered in any game ever.

Punch the trainer with your right arm three times! (Check). Now punch the trainer with left arm three times! (Check...). Now round-punch him with your right arm three times! (Erm). Now with your left arm three times! (Wha...). Now let's kick him with your right foot three times! (Turn game off). If you think this is bad, this is only the beginning - you then need to KO the trainer eight times in a row before it will let you progress. That's around ten minutes of doing the very same moves to the very same person over and over and over...

Or rather, we should say it is a taster for what is to come. Throughout the entirety of Fighters Uncaged, you will never need to change your tactics or learn new tricks - simply swinging your arms and legs in front of you is enough to beat every single opponent. The game will tell you that blocking is a good idea, but you can in fact just punch or kick whenever the game wants you to block, and you'll stop your opponent from making their move anyway!

Here is the icing on the cake, though - you don't control the movement of your character one-to-one - rather, if you swing your right arm, the game will detect that you want to perform a right punch and the protagonist will move via a set animation. When you've got this much motion-tracking power at your command, settling for a control scheme that would work just as well on the Wii is pitiful.

Did we mention that the main character is incredibly irritating? Throughout play, he will monologue in his head whenever he (i.e. you) makes a bad move - such classic lines as 'hmm, I should have blocked that' and 'I wish I didn't have to play this game anymore' (OK, we made that second one up). You'd expect the protagonist in a fighting game to be all manly and tough, but this guy is an absolute lemon, talking in a breathy voice and making the most pointless comments.

"This isn't the 'three-on-one' I had in mind..."

The rest of the game doesn't fare well either. Visually, it's a bit of a mess with dull environments to tussle in, bland character models that have about as much personality as a bucket of mud, and interfaces that are still stuck in the early 90's. Knock your opponent down, and you'll hear 'YOU WIN!' along with the words flashing up on screen in a very awkward fashion. The game tries to excite by launching your opponent to the ground whenever you knock them out, but by then you're already past the point of no return, and the damage to your fun glands is permanent.

So we well and truly hate Fighters Uncaged, and couldn't wait to remove it from our Xbox and see how many pieces we could cut the disc into - but that's not to say it's a complete waste of time! Here are our top tips as to why you may want to pick up a copy of Fighters Uncaged:

1. Playing this game will make all of your other Kinect games feel so, so wonderful. Remember when you played the boxing in Kinect Sports and thought 'eh, it's good, but nothing sensational'? Have an hour with Fighters Uncaged, then go back to Kinect Sports and witness how blindingly brilliant it is. As Adam Standing pointed out recently, playing crap games can make us appreciate the good ones just that little bit more!

2. Hold a cucumber in one hand and try playing Fighters Uncaged. Watch the predetermined animations play out instead of the one-to-one movement the Kinect is actually capable of, and pretend that you're playing on a Nintendo Wii! OK, that was a little harsh, but you still get the point.

This screenshot makes the game look WAY more exciting than it actually is

3. See if you can beat the entire game blindfolded. We believe this is not only possible, but should in fact be an unlockable game mode.

Fighters Uncaged is one of the worst cash-ins we've ever had the misfortune to play. If you're into throwing your arms and legs around while looking like an absolute spanner, pick a copy of this monstrosity up. Or you could just, you know, stand on the spot and throw your arms and legs about. See, you don't even need this game to help you look silly either!

Top Game Moment: Just before we started playing the game, when we were blissfully unaware of the torment we were about to endure.