I was cautiously optimistic about getting this game after discovering it a few months ago, and finally decided to go for it when it went on sale. However, it's just a big hassle that makes yoga less convenient. I expected it to be simply to get into a new routine and start doing yoga in a gamified way, but after struggling with it for almost an hour, that's not been the case.

First of all, the auto coach, where it tries to pick a routine for you, is just about useless. It has a top weight of 200, whether you are using metric or imperial units, so as an American, I thought I couldn't actually put my correct weight in until I tried switching to metric. It's a pretty basic oversight, and speaks poorly to the care that went into the game overall. Once I got that figured out, I discovered that it could recommend no programs to me at all. I guess because my BMI is too high? Who knows. Once I lowered my weight, it found something I could do theoretically.

That brings me to the next problem: none of the programs have useful names whatsoever. They're all essentially gibberish: A Step to Joy, Ambition, Free Yourself from the Past, Open Up to Life. Like, what? I'm an old-school yogi, but I'm used to programs having more coherent names like Stamina, Relaxation, heck, even Abs. Things that tell you what the routine is about. There are a few routines with names like Strength and Determination, which make a bit more sense perhaps, but still, overall it's fairly random.

Designing a routine was sort of convenient, but also not really, since it's not super obvious exactly what every pose is. A little animation for each could have helped, or both the Sanskrit and English names. Also, they're not in any kind of clear order. There are some standing poses, then some floor, then more standing, etc. You can't sort them or group them in any way, or use filters to limit the list to certain types of poses, so you're stuck with the default listing, which you have to scroll through to look for whatever pose you want. A search feature would have been great too.

And then the actual yoga. I'm not too confident about the way the poses are animated, and the instructions were a bit generic. Additionally, the routines have zero flow whatsoever. Every pose starts and ends in the same standing position. This causes two major problems: it extends the length of routines by quite a bit wasting time going back to that standing position, especially with floor poses. And it is another example of lack of care. Creating a dynamic set of transitions between various poses, not even necessarily all of them, but a lot of combinations, would have been really neat.

Overall, after giving this a try, I found it was taking way too much time just trying to get through the interface, and the yoga itself was uninspired. It's unfortunate, because I feel like a properly put together yoga game could be fantastic. I guess I'll have to keep waiting.