Kameo might be gorgeous to look at, showing off the Xbox 360's power, but the actual content is more Plain Jane.
Kameo is the ideal title to show off to your friends just how powerful the Xbox 360 is and you don’t need a High Definition Television set to appreciate the graphics. Often in the past people have said games have looked like cartoons but the character design of Kameo, her transformations and her foes all appear to have leapt out of Don Bluth’s sketchbook. There’s just so much going on to look at – glance into the sky and see dozens of dragons flying overhead or ride on a horse and see hundreds of trolls on the battlefield. This isn’t hyperbole either; there really are several minions on screen at once and it helps to give the game an epic vibe, which is compounded even further by the sheer scale of the environments. The locations are incredibly detailed, with lush foliage, imaginative creatures and beings and the best water effects in a game yet. Dust and light particles fill the air and everything seems alive. It’s brilliant to walk around and just take in the storybook scenery – adults, let alone children, will be entranced and enchanted by it.
What also strikes you is the rousing sound, which is so stunning that it wouldn’t be out of place on a silver screen. An orchestral musical score, complete with choir vocals for the more dramatic moments, really emphasises the sense of adventure and the enormity of your tasks. While the voice acting of the main characters also wouldn’t be amiss in Hollywood, Rare couldn’t quite resist the temptation to have comical accents applied to some of the bizarre creatures and villagers, though the delivery never reaches a Jar-Jar Binks level of irritation.
There are other elements to the presentation that are also slick and would be welcome in other games in the future. That the game saves frequently is appreciated. That it offers hints from the Wotnot Book on the pause menu means you won’t be stumped on what you have to do and need to resort to consulting a guide (though it does seem to always want to give you advice, even when you’re doing some little side quest – shut up already!). It offers a reminder of what objective you need to do next, so you don’t have to worry about picking the game up a week later and being unable to finish it. These are simple things Kameo achieves but that these are finally being integrated into games means we can concentrate more time on playing the game and less time wondering aimlessly looking for a save point.
The whole of the game revolves around the Elements of Power, which allow Kameo to transform into one of ten kooky creatures. Your nefarious sister, Kalus, has teamed up with the malevolent troll king Thorn out of spite for not sharing your abilities and this is the cue for the rather disjointed start of the game. You start in Thorn’s Castle with three abilities – Pummel Weed, who excels at fighting, Major Ruin, who rolls around like Samus in Metroid Prime and Chilla, who can scale walls of ice and throw shards at his enemies. It’s quite dramatic but you don’t really know why you’re doing it. After spending forty minutes doing this stage you then have lose these abilities and are then confronted with, bizarrely, a tutorial stage telling you how to move and use the camera in the Enchanted Kingdom main hub. But you already did that stuff a few minutes ago! It’s really rather odd but the game does settle down into splicing exploration, puzzle solving and having a good scrap. New Elements are introduced at a regular basis, usually in batches of three, and it’s pretty obvious you’ll need to use them for certain puzzles to get through the next dungeon. Most of these elemental warriors are pretty distinctive but a few are so bland that you’ll not use them in the rest of the game if possible. And while most are easy to control Deep Blue, the only character who can swim, will have you baffled with the completely different way of controlling him. You’ll look up when you want to go forward, you’ll struggle to fight villains as you face the wrong direction… it’s just as well the game looks as pretty as it does or you may end up playing a new game: just how far can a wireless controller be thrown? That so much focus is given to these elements also means that Kameo as a character is rather underdeveloped and as she can do little by herself she only ends up getting used sparingly. Consequently it makes it far harder to care about her plight.
While the fighting can be entertaining as Pummel Weed, most of the time combat feels like you’re going through the motions and when the game bombards you with numerous enemies later in the game it can just be more frustrating than anything else. Perhaps this is down to the simplified control scheme – your warrior’s actions are all consigned to the shoulder buttons, which makes the number of combos and options available pretty limiting, even if you add extra abilities by finding elemental fruit. The face buttons are a quick way to access three of your warriors, though accessing your other elements quickly is a pain, as you either have to fiddle around in the pause menu or try and do it on the fly in-game, whilst you’re being battered by trolls. It’d have been far more convenient if the action stopped while you’re making necessary changes.
Similarly the puzzles all seem pretty obvious. Even though the game doesn’t resort to dull fetch quests, which have blighted previous Rare titles, you can pretty much guess what you have to do if you’ve played similar games in the genre. Take the first level, where you see a jewel above a gate. You shoot it with a shard of ice from Chilla, the gate half opens and you go under it by using Pummel Weed’s ability to bury himself in the ground. You then do it another two times. This trend of doing things in patterns of three means you’re rarely bamboozled or at a loss at what to do. Once again you’re going through the motions because it’s so repetitive. There’s never a moment where you complete a puzzle, look back and think it was genuinely clever, as you’re basically doing the obvious stuff using the abilities you’ve just unlocked. Actually, that’s the problem of the game as a whole – you play it and then realise there were few memorable, distinctive moments.
At ten to twelve hours long the game is rather short but in its current form it probably didn’t need to be any longer and there really isn’t much to offer in the way of replayability. You could go around collecting more elemental fruit or trying to find some secrets but there’s no compelling reason to do so. You could always invite a friend around to tackle the co-op but the mode is clearly tacked on, recycling the same levels as the single player, having you both as the same character and offering no new puzzles which would you require you to work together. That the game has been in development for over five years and to still be this sloppy is slightly distressing.
While Kameo is doing new stuff with the aesthetics it’s the same old style of gameplay underneath and you have to wonder how enjoyable it would really be if it wasn’t for the stunning presentation. If this is your first venture into the genre this over-familiarity won’t be a problem for you. Likewise, a child will really enjoy the fantastical world. For those who’ve been playing games for years the title is nothing more than lazy Sunday afternoon gaming – pleasant and undemanding, something to preoccupy yourself with rather than just sitting on the sofa and scratching your arse. However, we should give credit to Rare where it is due. This is the ideal game to ride the crest of the wave of goodwill that comes from owners of expensive new hardware, who will be forgiving of a game’s flaws as long as it is flashy enough. On the original Xbox it would be hard to imagine that many people would have been interested in such a plain little title, and it’s hard to imagine that in two years time people will even remember Kameo, let alone revere the game.