Kinect works by emitting IR light, so it should be independent from the lighting, unless the lighting itself has a lot of IR that would drown the signal (like natural sunlight or halogen lamps).
I'd like to know more about the game by the way (seriously). Is there the equivalent of a move list for the characters ? How does defense work ? And what didn't you like, was it lag, did you have gestures non recognized, was it boring ?
we got a small introduction with some moves, like grapling (didn't work for me, but the Ubi woman did it so this was propably me), punches, kicks. You just do it and the kinekt recognizes which arm or leg is being used. If you lean back, you can dodge and with leaning forward your charakter moves forward. Somehow it is possible to dodge sideway, don't know how. Made it one time by mistake, the Ubi woman told me before I played it would be a 2D only fighter , but that seems wrong.
You can block attacks by holding your arms in front of you like all the fighting games charakters do it in the games, or real boxers. Also if you put your arms up, you can fill a special bar to do some awesome attacks. The game also recognizes when you are going into your knees.Doing multiple punches and kicks in a row results in a combo.
In theory it should work, but it seems like you have to do the gestures exactly like the game intended. Often my charakter didn't move forward when I leaned forward, grappling didn't work. Also there is a really noticable lag when doing your attacks. I won my first match against the Ubisoft woman, but lost the second and third. Somehow doing randomly fast punches gave her the edge, but I wanted to do some controlled attacks and did not really have a chance.
It wasn't really boring, but I don't see it working as a decent fighter in its current state (this can change, potential is there). Was fun for one round, but didn't really feel the need for another try after playing it. Also the game crashed once while a friend of mine was playing.
A cool feature was the ability to take sticks as weapons from the ground or use a pole for a pole round kick. But myself did not do this move, but it was used against me.
In comparism, the 7 year ols Wii Sports boxing felt like more control over your charakter. but of course you can't do kicks there. The blocking is actually quite similar.