As solid a workout game as Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2013 is -- and it's unquestionably a decent game, don't get me wrong -- I can't think of who I'd recommend it to.

I mean, I know its target audience: people who want to game and get in shape at the same time. That actually describes me pretty perfectly -- for a few years now, the bulk of my exercise has come from extended amounts of time with Wii Fit and Fit In Six, not to mention Adidas miCoach, UFC Personal Trainer, Get Fit With Mel B, and numerous other games of that ilk. In other words, I'm always eager to find games that get me off the couch and moving. And, as I said, Your Shape can definitely do that. It's got a wide range of workouts and activities that target all areas of the body. So what's my problem with it?

It's not at all different from those other games, basically. I don't just mean that in the sense that it shares a genre with them; I mean that, in some cases, it's almost literally the same game. It may look a little different from Fit In Six, for example, but it has almost all the same exercises, and it has the exact same voice telling you what to do and giving you encouragement. And while I have to admit that I haven't played Your Shape on the Xbox, going solely from the screenshots and videos available on the game's official site (which may be a dicey proposition, I know), it looks like Ubisoft didn't do much beyond remove Kinect functionality and replace it with support for the old Wii controllers.

In other words, if you ditched your Wii for a PS3 or an Xbox 360, and you're thinking about switching back to the Wii U because you want to get back into fitness games, Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2013 isn't really worth doing it for. Those systems already have extremely worthwhile workout games, and there's nothing here that you can't get for the console you already own.

But what of Wii U owners, or Wii owners looking to upgrade? They may have slightly more compelling reasons for picking up Your Shape...but only slightly. Your Shape definitely isn't as fun, or as engaging, or as thorough as the genre's gold standard, Wii Fit -- and seeing as the Wii U is backwards compatible, and can still play Wii Fit, that makes it hard to recommend picking up a new game when the old one will still work perfectly well.

On top of that, there's the spectre of Wii Fit U on the horizon. While no one knows exactly how that game is going to turn out, it seems reasonable to believe that it's going to be good, and that it's going to make use of the Wii U in ways that only Nintendo can imagine. While I hate to suggest that anyone buy fewer games, or not buy a game because a similar one will be out soon that may be better, I'd argue that fitness is the one genre in all of video games where you can make a convincing argument that you only need one -- after all, fitness games track your progress, and to get a full measure of how you've been doing, you need to stick with one of them. While, hopefully, $50 now wouldn't prevent anyone from buying a similarly-priced game three or four months from now, it still makes it hard to encourage anyone buy Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2013 when Wii Fit U is the big, invisible elephant in the room.

Say, though, that you don't mind that unknown -- you have no problem buying one game now, and buying another one (that makes the first game irrelevant) a few months from now. And say that you don't have Wii Fit or a Wii (or any other consoles, for that matter), but you do have a Wii U and you want to get in shape without having to pick up a Wii Balance Board. Is Your Shape worth picking up then?

That, I guess, is the game's sweetspot. And for this small group of people, Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2013 should be a godsend. Like its counterpart on the Xbox, and like Fit In Six on the PS3, it has an excellent mix of exercises that target all parts of the body, and it does a good job of providing activities for couch potatoes and the already fit alike. While I can't see it appealing to a large group of people, it should still appeal to some people, and for them (but only for them), I'd recommend this game unreservedly.