Slicker than your average.

Toned up

Ubisoft knows when it's onto a good thing: not only is the publisher bringing Just Dance 3 to Kinect, it's also gearing up to launch a sequel to the sensor's biggest selling fitness title. Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012 is set for release this November with all the original game's content and some new tricks up its sleeve too.

Game designer Nicola Godin told us the new game contains over 90 hours of improved and brand new content, as well as enhanced tracking capabilities. Most importantly, the game now includes floor tracking, greatly increasing the software's usefulness. Godin explained that the game uses Ubisoft's own body-tracking technology for floor exercises, but that ease of use was the team's chief concern: whereas most fitness games have you face the sensor for press-ups and the like, Your Shape has you side-on to the sensor, offering enhanced tracking as well as stopping any neck strain from looking at the screen. Sound effects and improved vocal feedback will let you know when you're doing well or where you need to improve, with Ubisoft promising there'll be none of the difficult navigation that so many fitness games have suffered from.

Who runs the world? We all do in Your Shape 2012.

Aside from the new floor exercises, there's also a new boot camp feature that Ubi hopes will attract male players, as well as a built-in dance mode with several musical genres and tutorial classes, spanning 10 hours or so of gameplay on its own. The popular cardio boxing and zen modes return with improvements, as do new exercises like skipping and African dance, though the most intriguing is the Run the World feature. Here a simple jogging-on-the-spot game is turned into a trek through New York, London and Paris in a Google Earth-type affair. For those bored of running the same trails and treadmills, this could add a bit of zip back into training.

Your Shape showed Ubisoft Montreal has the potential to create a great fitness game, and with a series of refinements and new additions Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012 is another step towards that goal. We'll see how well-toned the game is when it's released later this year.