I bought the Gold's Gym Cardio Workout 'game' for my Nintendo Wii in order to give me a little something extra to use when I'm working out in front of my television. I still use my treadmill and weight bench at home, but I do enjoy playing around on the Wii from time to time. I found this exercise game to be neat at first, but it ends up being rather simplistic and doesn't measure enough of your performance for me to want to stick with it.

This is mainly just a rhythm boxing game with a few added exercises. In order to get the full intended workout, you have to assume a boxing stance and weave back and forth in tune with the beat of the music and your on-screen trainer. When prompted, you have to throw various punches and the game measures your timing and form. While this all might sound cool, the execution of it all leaves something to be desired.

The main problem I had with this game is that it only measures your punches. There is nothing included to measure your rhythm and body movements, which really burns more calories than just throwing timed punches. Because of this, you can actually stand still and punch and the game does not know the difference. Without any kind of mechanism to actually measure how well you are keeping time with the game, it is easy to get your body out of sync and it not make any difference so long as you still throw the punch at the right time.

Another problem I had with this game was that it doesn't measure your punches very well. It barely even knows the difference between an uppercut and a hook, as it mainly just detects the motion. When you get to the workout sections where you have to block, it can be really frustrating because I had to use exaggerated movements just to make the game move my boxer out of the way.

One big selling point of this game, at least for me, was that it lets you use the Wii Balance Board. Unfortunately, it only lets you use the board during a handful of exercises. I was hoping to use the board during the core part of the game, but that is not an option. In my eyes, that was kind of misleading. The added exercises are nice and do make a good addition to the Wii Fit ones, but they don't provide enough to make me want to switch discs when I get done using the Wii Fit.

Another misleading thing about this game was that the back of the box shows a screenshot where it gives the results of a workout, and among those results is a calorie rating. To me, this implied that the game would measure your number of calories burned during a workout, which would be most awesome. In reality, all the game does is give you an estimated number of calories depending on the boxing workout, so depending on your flat weight bench and age, the number can be far from accurate.

The graphics are pretty good for a Wii game and it uses three different locations to the workouts, which was pretty nice. Most of the extra graphics on the location is just eye candy because it does nothing for the gameplay besides giving you something to look at for about three seconds before you start boxing training. The sound is also pretty good as it features a bunch of synthesized music, including a couple of familiar tunes like the classic Eye of the Tiger song made famous in Rocky. Exercise games like this aren't really made to impress with graphics and sound, but I will say this game does look and sound better than the bland Wii Fit.

I was disappointed by this game because it did not deliver the goods I expected, and some of the selling points on the packaging were misleading. The bottom line here is that I get more of a workout from a round of boxing in Wii Sports than I do in 10 minutes on the Gold's Gym Cardio Workout Cap Barbell Weight Bench.