Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"All flash, no substance"

The underlying concept in Kameo has potential to make a decent platformer. The ability to change into different forms that have different powers is fairly unique and could open a game to some very interesting puzzle solving. Unfortunately, Kameo fails to accomplish this task.

Throughout the game you collect ten different elemental warriors, each with their own abilities. Unfortunately, many of these abilities are bland and fairly uninspired, and frequently amount to nothing more than what would have been accomplished by having Kameo learn to use a bow and arrow or some other weapon or item. More unfortunate than that, however, is how limited most abilities are. Some characters will barely be used. Rubble's usefulness in the main story is gone shortly after you get him. Pummel Weed quickly becomes too weak to be of much use in fights. 40 Below's ability to ride along ice paths is used only once immediately after attaining the character. Even forms that are useful and used frequently like Major Ruin, Chilla, and Thermite have fairly limited uses, making for a lot of repetition. Having to use Major Ruin to roll along a path and then convert to Chilla in mid air to grab onto an ice wall is used far too much. At the end of the game, there are multiple instances where in order to progress you must use Thermite to get a large troll to reveal its weakness and then convert to Chilla to throw icicles at it.

Putting aside the uselessness and repetitiveness of many of the abilities, one warrior stands out as being worse than any of the others. Deep Blue (the only character able to swim underwater) has such horrendously annoying controls that it makes the few segments where he is necessary painful. Of particular note is the boss battle where you must use him to go underwater and shoot his torpedoes at the weak spots. This battle (quite possibly the most frustrating part of the game) is made all the more annoying by needing to use Major Ruin to launch bombs at the boss in order to trigger the enemy's descent into the water. Rolling things around is very annoying and incredibly nitpicky, and is necessary at several times in the game. Even worse is when you need to position Major Ruin perfectly and roll quickly into them. Even a slightly wrong angle will have the spherical item flying off in a completely unplanned direction.

The controls are problematic at other times due to an inability move characters very precisely. Rolling 40 Below along narrow ice paths results in many annoying deaths. Trying to use Ash's effective fire breath on enemies is difficult since positioning him in the right orientation to be most effective is nearly impossible.

Taking all of this into account, Kameo is missing something crucial to all games. The fun. The game really amounts to little more than a series of repetitive or annoying tasks.

Kameo's plot is also incredibly generic and weak. Basically your sister is jealous about your ability to control elemental warriors, and launches an attack on your home with the aid of the Troll King Thorn, and also kidnaps some of your family members. The oracle lady you meet early in the game transparently has ulterior motives, though very little is done to ever explain exactly what they are (there are brief glimpses during the final scene). The game's ending is incredibly cliched in many, many ways featuring such overused ideas as when a character comes to the sudden realization that he or she has been wrong, and the individual who sacrifices him or herself to save the world. If a platformer isn't going to make the effort to design a decently strong story (such as in the Sly Cooper or Ratchet and Clank series) then they shouldn't even try (such as in the Mario games).

Is Kameo completely awful? I suppose not. It's an improvement on the boring Conker (see my review) and Starfox Adventures. But it still fails to entertain enough to be considered decent.