WII Fit is not so much a game as a personal trainer, designed to help you reach your goal of losing weight. To do such a thing with a video game is quite a novel idea (though already much imitated) and has received considerable acclaim. Does it really do the job though?
After setting up your characters (your MII can be imported) with weight and height details, you set your goal in terms of weight loss (or gain, if you're primarily looking to build muscle bulk). WII Fit will automatically track your progress and keep you updated as to how you're doing.
Each day when you first log in (you can do it more or less often than daily of course), you will first be given the option of doing a Body Test. This will check your weight and show you your BMI - depending on the results, your MII may develop a large stomach or not. Then there are two "athletic tests", such as balancing on one leg, shifting your balance to hit targets on the screen, etc. After this you will then be presented with your WII Fit Age - calculated from your actual age and your performance in the acrobatic ability tests. Your MII will celebrate or weep depending on how you do.
The training section of WII fit is divided into 4 main types:
Aerobic exercise - fat-burning exercises. Some examples of these are a dancing, rhythmic boxing and jogging. Mostly these are quick fun and relatively challenging, hula-hoops is a major killer on your abs. A pretty good selection, though there could have been more variety.
Yoga positions - various poses that you must keep for xx seconds, the WII balance board will help determine if you're doing it correctly and how much movement you have, measured by changes in your centre of gravity. To be honest I wasn't expecting to like this section at all, but to my surprise it's actually quite enjoyable and also very challenging.
Muscle exercise - not all of these particularly use the balance board or Wiimote, and basically there's no advantage doing these exercises on the WII compared to having a couple of dumbbells and using them. Not the strongest part of the package, but reasonably well implemented for all that.
Balance games - where I tend to spend most of my time playing WII Fit - skiing, tightrope walking and more await your pleasure. The games are, on the whole, quite fun and provide a decent challenge, and while not burning a huge number of calories do improve your balance
Once you've achieved a certain level, you unlock higher levels of those exercises. In the balance games you have "Advanced" and "Super-Advanced" levels, muscle exercises unlock longer workouts, etc. As you exercise you earn "WII Fit Cash" which, after a while, will unlock further games and challenges. This is good at first because it provides goal-oriented exercising, which is the main advantage of this over conventional exercise. Fairly quickly though you've unlocked most features of the game. The high score tables help to keep you coming back, especially when more than one person is using
WII Fit and you can compete with each other.
The key element of
WII Fit is the WII Balance Board, which you stand on or use in various other ways for the games and exercises. It's a fairly sturdy unit, and ours has certainly taken some serious usage without complaining. It's an innovative control feature and more games are making use of it, so the balance board is a good purchase in itself. The board becomes the base for yoga poses or muscle workouts, a dance mat, snowboard, or whatever else is needed.
All in all
WII Fit is a good product, though not perfect. It seems from reading reviews and personal experience that those who get the most out of it are not in fact those most dedicated to exercising (who would surely already be going to the gym or engaging in various forms of exercise
anyway), but rather those wanting to lose weight
and who haven't played many video games before. To me the biggest weakness of the game is that, while quite a few of the games / exercises are fun, they're not as much fun as they could be, not enough of them are fun to do, and there's not enough variety to them.
We were using it regularly with some decent results and then stopped because it became boring. Months elapsed and recently we started using
WII Fit again, not necessarily daily, and as an
aid to losing weight, not the main focus of it. We've found that it works much better that way and still enjoy trying to beat our high scores.
The music is good, perhaps a little repetitive, but overall it definitely adds to the game. The graphics are nothing special but function well enough, and some of the animations are very funny. The game is slightly too obsessed with being "cute", sometimes to the point of annoyance, but mostly it's not a problem. There is a fair amount of customisability built into the package, so no matter how many people are using the product independently, they will be able to set it up to their liking.
If you're expecting
WII Fit to be the solution to all your diet and exercise problems, think again. If you want something that will help (irrespective of the weather) and is a bit of fun now and then, WII Fit definitely fits the bill. Don't view it primarily as a game, as that will definitely lead to disappointment. The balance board is worth having in its own right, so although the price for
WII Fit seems a little high, ultimately it's worth it.
You can also burn some calories by playing:
WII SportsMario and Sonic at the Olympics
