Carnival Games Xbox 360Carnivals are great fun aren’t they?

Rickety rollercoasters, fluffy toys bigger than your family pooch, and enamel-dissolving candy floss.

Then again they also have the potential for giving you whiplash, a merry gypsy mugging or a mild aneurysm from attempting to get the ring around the bottle neck for the 32nd time in a row.

But 2K Play have had considerable success transporting the experience to the DS and Wii in the past, and the jump to Xbox 360 and Kinect seems more appropriate a platform than ever before.

Unsurprisingly for a Kinect title, it’s mini-game o’clock, with over 20 fair-themed games to play with. The obvious offenders are all here (ring throwing, balloon popping, knocking over milk bottles) as well as some perculiar ones that never made it to the Kent Countryside while I was growing up (pig riding, rocket flying).

There’s an uncomfortably wonky accuracy success rate, meaning that for every enjoyable distraction, there are a number of infuriating misses. The aforementioned Pig Race, for example – which had the potential to be one of the silly highlights – is made practically unplayable with a motion detection that would probably be more accurate if you actually were straddling a piggy.

It’ll have you clamouring for the days you could actually throw the controller across the room in anger.

When you do actually manage to complete one of the games successfully, you have the option of exchanging won tickets on a number of amusingly ridiculous Avatars (Pirate garb FTW), although the majority won’t actually let you carry them over to your non-game Avatar.

As an all-ages party title, it does the job, alas by retaining all the naff ‘fun’ of the fair (the sporadic skill set, the repetitiveness, the lame pay-off), it can be frustrating even in its family-friendly simplicity.

On the plus side, you’re probably less likely to be mugged.

[Rating:2.5/5]