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> Results: Kameo: Elements of Power
Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us | Buy This Game Scroll down for our Kid Factor. 
The game opens in the middle of a castle battle with flocks of dragons flying around your head. You work your way through mobs of trolls and learn how to use your abilities to get past your obstacles. Your family is at the top of the tower in the clutches of your traitorous older sister and you have to rescue them. But just as you reach them, you are surprised by a mountainous troll who quite literally knocks the Elemental Warriors right out of you. Now you have to get them back, and rescue your family while stopping Thorn the Troll King from taking over the Elven lands.
This isn't the first time this game has ever tried to hit shelves. It's been six years in the making and has been aimed at three different consoles in the process. It's a miracle it's not a fractured mess. And it isn't. The gameplay is solid, with no bugs or visible panty-lines to break you out of the experience. With the Xbox360 hardware behind it I expected it to be pretty, but I wasn't quite ready for the full scope of it. It's just plain gorgeous to look at. All the art direction is amazing, from the base designs of the areas to the final texture and atmosphere effects. In the Enchanted Kingdom, it's all very cute. There are pretty flowers and gingerbread architecture as far as the eye can see. Rainbows and waterfalls and the whole bit. Thorn's Castle is a mechanized nightmare as dirty and grim as the Enchanted Kingdom is nice. It's not all sweetness and light. Don't worry, once out in the wilds things are in turmoil. Bombs are falling, and a war is on. The Badlands are torn up between ranging hordes of trolls and the Elven Knights. The place is crawling with trolls. And when I say crawling, I mean C-R-A-W-L-I-N-G. Where you first emerge into the area called the Badlands, you're standing in a crowd of baddies several hundred deep. Reminded me of Helm's Deep for a bit. The Xbox360 gets put to work in a major way and it stands up to it very well. If you've pigeonholed this game as a cute little platformer, you'd be wrong. The puzzle elements are well thought through and can't just be blazed past by closing your eyes and throwing punches. Your Warriors are just as essential for getting through the levels as they are for putting boot to butt. And there's a whole lot of flying fists (or ice spikes or whatever) necessary to thin Thorn's ranks. There's no real blood, but lots of ick. When a troll dies his body disappears in a cloud of flies. There are these giant bugs that are all over the place and when you kill them their ichor splatters the screen like a grasshopper on a windshield. I actually ducked a couple times because you would swear there were bug-bits flying past you.  The fighting aspects are handled a lot more like a combat game. As you go through the levels, all your fights earn you points. How well you fight earns you bonus multipliers. I really wasn't expecting the more hardcore mechanics in it. There's a nice variety in your combat options, and in your opponents. Not only do you have the Elemental Warriors to help you, Kameo has some pretty good moves hiding under those frilly wings. The AI isn't going to become a member of MENSA anytime soon, but it does a pretty good job. The RPG aspects of the game give the combat system even more scope. Your various Elemental Warriors have their own different skills, and they all have different challenges and enemies that they are suited to deal with. How you choose to upgrade your Warriors and what situations you use them in are key to success, and gives you lots of what-if's to play with. The game strikes a nice balance between bee lining from mission to mission and random smacking. If you really want to sit around abusing trolls and amassing points you can, but you can also head off to the next story section and some of those knights will stick around and deal with them. It was a nice touch. Believe me, you've got enough to worry about dealing with your own knitting. You do have help. In this game, the non-player characters are not just a bunch of non-entities. The denizens of all the different areas are not just pacing in squares waiting for you to rifle their stuff. They have their own jobs to do and their own personalities, and they are a central part of your success. They're all well placed. In the Enchanted Kingdom, there are flying guys with fuzzy ears all over the place. Remember Watto from "Episode I: The Phantom Menace"? They would be his good twins, but in a Bob's-your-uncle way. There's a bunch of big, lantern-jawed types running around, too, but they're not much for conversation - they're all practicing to get ready to go out and deal some discipline on the trolls. Once you're on your way, the plant-looking guys out in the outlying areas are particularly helpful. Watch out for the gal who lives in that big seashell up at the waterfalls, though. She's quite rude, and if you try to rifle her house she'll really give you the rough side of her tongue.  The cooperative and online play modes are an additional area to explore. As you play the single-player game, you unlock the cooperative levels. This is not a mechanic I've ever really liked. It means you have to finish the single-player game in order to play them all. It didn't bug me this time, mostly because if you don't have the skills honed in the single-player experience with those Warriors you're hosed when you try to play the levels online anyways. Once you've got them unlocked you play specific levels from the game, strictly for combat points. All the players have access to all the Elemental Warriors you would have unlocked while playing that game in the single-player game. You can both freely switch between the Warriors, and even be the same guy at the same time. This adds a great dimension in creative problem solving and added some great re-playability. Playing through the single-player campaign takes somewhere between 10 and 15 hours. This does seem short, but with the combat system it really does behoove you to invest more time in it and go back and really get some big points. That's how the secret content in the game is unlocked. You have to achieve certain scores by replaying the levels. We've unlocked the FMV viewer so we can watch all the movies whenever we want, and there are some other goodies we're still working on. The game is loaded with original ideas, and with some creative uses of some old favorites that make for a brain-tickling as well as thumb-tiring workout. I could have wished for some more variety in the online play, but what's up there is pretty good. Both the single-player and online modes give a lot of good XboxLive Achievement Points if that's your goal. The only real sore spot is the shortness of the single-player campaign. 
This one is T-rated, and I'd definitely stick with that. I'd probably go as young as 10 if you're going to play along, but no younger than 13 on their own. There's some pretty mature topics handled in the story, plus it can be frustrating as all heck. The hardcore combat mechanics can be hard to master. You get dropped right into the deep end when the game loads.
This isn't a happy place, despite all the rainbows and etc. The boss fights are confusing and dark and grim. One of your Elemental Warriors is like a refugee from Little Shop of Horrors and eats your opponents. Several areas require spitting or kicking the baddies into a huge fan with predictable results. It's kind of jarring to see the butterfly-winged girl whomping big gnarly things and earning bonuses like "Carnage" and "Brutal". There's not even a nod to sex in the game unless you count kissing a stone troll. Some very minor skin, though - Kameo's outfit is a little short and her sister looks like she rummaged Elvira's closet before going out to take over the world. No one managed an up-skirt shot of Kameo, even when she was flying. They didn't even really try hard. It really just doesn't register. It's very gender-neutral, but it's most definitely not aimed at girls. There are female characters in positions of authority all over the place, and the matter-of-fact way they are integrated make it clear they are not in any way remarkable. My girls thought it was all right, but the combat mechanics and the ick factor in particular didn't play well here. They'll probably never pick it out of the lineup on their own in the face of DOA and the rest of it, but if your child is a teen who likes RPG's and platforming this just might be right up their alley. There's little in the way of gore and really mature topics, but there's plenty of cool factor. We had a couple neighbor guys stop playing GUN and come over to my house to play this one. They particularly liked the various Elemental Warriors and had fun working with them all. Chilla (the gorilla with spikes) and Flex (the blue blobby thing with all the tentacles) both got rave reviews for their combat abilities and general coolness. One of those boys changed his formerly Halo-based Messenger sign in to "SpikyMonkey" and there was a minor run on the game down at the local game store. If you're not sure, you might want to give this one a rental and see how it plays at your house. Comments? Chat about it in our forums! Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us | Buy This Game Home > Review Archive > Video Games > Results: Kameo: Elements of Power |
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