EA Sports Active is a great workout game!

Author's Rating:

Pros: Great preset workouts and great options for customizing your workout!

Cons: No weigh in/scale option, repetitive trainer comments, lack of options to customize character.

The Bottom Line: 
Great preset workouts but what really makes it shine is the option to really customize what you want to do.  A very large variety of exercises to choose from.

Author's Review
Over the years I have bought many workout machines, gadgets, video tapes and a few games to try and get myself in better shape.  In January I bought a Wii for the exclusive reason of using it as a means of exercising.

I started off with Wii Sports, then got Wii Fit, Samba De Amigo, Helix (a downloadable Wii dance game) & Gold's Gym.  In the past for the Xbox I had YourselfFitness (which is now a Wii port called "My Fitness Coach").

The Wii Fit game was a nice start but was not adequate enough, IMO, to get a decent workout without it taking an extreme amount of time switching between exercises.  Samba De Amigo & Helix (both dance type games) are fun for a nice cardio workout.  Gold's Gym had some appeal but lacked variety.

So I couldn't wait to try out EA Sports Active.  I was hoping it would give me a full body workout and a challenge and it has succeeded in doing both.

The menu area is a bit confusing but you can either choose to do their 30 day challenge or you can opt to pick from a very long list of preset workouts or make your own custom workouts.  The 30 Day challenge chooses a preprogrammed workout for you each day you workout and varies it so you aren't doing the same exact workout each day.

The game comes with a leg strap to hold the nunchuck for lower body leg work, an exercise resistant band that you have to attach the added hand straps too (not too difficult or time consuming to do) and an additional velcro strip to use to tighten the leg strap if you find it too big to fit correctly.

I first opted to check out the 30 Day Challenge.  Before the workout starts you see a list of what exercises will be included.  You can uncheck the ones you don't want to do.  I opted to not do the running in place - overweight and bad knees makes that a difficult option for me. 

I thought I got an excellent workout from the one they started me off with.  Had issues with the squats not registering so I ended up skipping those (which is an easy push of the button to tell it to skip an exercise you don't want to do).  I've heard others having this issue and it could have been that I either had the leg band too high or too low or didn't have the nunchuck positioned properly in the leg strap).

But when I was finished by skipping the track/running exercises & the squats I ended up getting about a 22 minute workout (I like to workout for 45 minutes to an hour).  So I went to the custom/preset workout selection and set up a custom workout to finish up my time.  I found I liked the option of being able to pick exactly what I wanted to do.

Basically, there are categories at the top that you can scroll through, Cardio, Sports, Upper, Lower to pick what you want to add.  I use some exercises from each category.  You click on an exercise you want to do and it adds it to the workout.  Each exercise is a little block of about a minute or two.  They line up on the bottom so you can see what you've added.

Cardio has a variety of boxing exercise, heavy bag, targets & heavy bag, targets and some with the wii fit board where you do the targets and in the heavy bag portion are doing kicks and kneeing the bag.  It also has dancing and a variety of walking running exercises (haven't tried the walking/running ones).  The dance exercise were a little disappointing to me because they aren't that intense but they do make a great cool down portion of my workout because of it.  They have some easy, intermediate and fastest exercises.  There is also a couple where you can use the wii fit board and then you get a little step portion of the dance section.  Wish they had exercises dedicated to just the step like Wii Fit has (which I enjoyed very much).

The Upper & Lower sections have many strenght training exercises to choose from.  Like bicep curls, cross knee punches, shoulder presses, tricep kickbacks, and many more.  For the upper selections you get to use the resistance band to get an even better result.  The lower body exercises include, lunges, alternating lunges, squats, side lunges & toe touches, side to side jumps and more.

And lastly there are the Sports exercise.  These I find the most fun!  They include Tennis, Vollyball, Baseball & Basketball.  None of these are playing a game like in Wii Sports but are just doing the individual moves. 

For Tennis you are do forehand, backhand and overhead slam and you can also use the board where you do a lunge off the board to hit the ball on either side.  For me, the tennis portion is great because you really feel like you are doing backhands, forehands and overhead slams.  There, again, are many varieties to choose from. 

In the Baseball portion you pitch (aiming at and knocking over stacked bottles), you catch with the nunchuck & throw the ball at a target with the wiimote and you bat with the wiimote.  I surprisingly enjoyed this one as well thinking I wouldn't get into the baseball one.  The catching portion is a lot of fun where you have to either stretch to the right or left to catch the ball or bend down to catch grounders.  Again, there is an option to use the wii fit board and do lunges as you catch the ball.

In Basketball you have a cart with the balls "next" to you where you turn to the left to "grab" them and then you aim at one of the three targets selected (one on the right, one in the middle and one on the left).  Then there is shooting hoops as well.

Vollybally you get to serve, block and either have your arms down low with your hands together to bring them up to hit the ball (bump I think they called it) or you have your hands up in front of your chest/face area ready to pop them up to hit the ball over the net (not sure what they called it).  And block is jumping up at the right time and blocking.

I was pretty impressed with how realistic these all felt and quite pleased with them.

My typical workout starts out with a variety of the boxing starting off with hitting the bag, targetting and the bag and using the wiifit board to do the kicks and knee ups, then I'll have the baseball, tennis, volley ball and I'll mix in through out the whole workout some upper and lower body exercises (probably about ten or so).

You can increase the difficulty as well for each individual exercise or choose to increase the entire set.  As you add each exercise it adds up how many minutes they estimate it will take you and how many calories you may burn.  If you increase the difficulty it will automatically increase the time and calories.  When you start the workout it again will show you the list of exercises and then it will project how many calories you may burn.  Depending on how hard you are swinging/hitting your targets will increase/decrease this projection.  I've, so far, always burned more calories than they've projected.

Some issues that I didn't like were the fact that there is no "weigh in" option like on the Wii Fit, I don't like that you don't get to check and see how long you worked out for and how many calories burned each day (it adds them all together so you get a total amount that you have burned or how many hours you have worked out).   No step - don't know why they didn't include a separate step exercise.  Also felt the dance sections could have been better.  With so many dance type games out there to compare to this falls at the bottom of both challenge and fun (but again, good for my cooldown period).

And a few more issues are the "trainer" repeats the same few phrases over & over again and it can be quite annoying.  There a very few options for customizing your person.  And a few times while hitting the tennis ball the ball goes through the target and doesn't register that I've hit it.  This has only happened a couple of times.

The nitpicks are very minor in comparison to the whole picture as I find this to be a very well put together "game".