Kameo - Second Play: Completed Single Player

Kameo walked out into the sun-swept fields of her youth and saw them lit now in the red spatters of various incendiary siege weapons. However, life continued on almost as normal behind the elves’ magical shield. Each citizen believed that nothing could penetrate their floating fortress. Kameo raised her glance skyward for a moment to the peaks of their island achievement. All of the elf designed cloudscrapers had been erected by the endless labor of the green-skinned trolls. She remembered now the feelings she had as a young flitterbug; slightly wary of the troll’s presence, but largely uninterested. It was almost as if they’d been invisible.

Kameo shuddered at her more recent memory of the battlefield outside. The tide of trolls had been indescribable, continual waves of warriors stretching out into the distance and cries of freedom echoing to the four corners of the earth. Kameo had flittered in and out of the battle, her wings aching with the strain of it, barely escaping with her life. In every troll’s eyes had been the hunger to tear down what they themselves had built. Kameo struggled with her thoughts for a moment more, but there was no time for introspection. The horn of battle had sounded and all elves must answer.

In an interesting aside for Kameo, all of the subtext in my hypothetical narrative above was gleaned from the games frequent loading screens. There is absolutely no hint whatsoever in the actual game that the trolls are anything but mindless killing machines. However, the loading screens are populated by quotes from famous Kameo characters which paint a much different story. It’s almost as if someone wanted to attach a little extra depth to the story after the game was put together. I found this interesting both because it highlights the common problem of black and white back stories, and because I found the loading screen text much more interesting than the cliché cutscenes. I caught myself hoping that Kameo 2 would be told from the perspective of the trolls, perhaps a troubled young troll rallies his fellows for a final assault against the tyranny of the elves.

The voice acting in Kameo is decent; I just didn’t care about any of the characters. The pop-up dialog boxes didn’t help this any. I can understand English; I don’t need a text box with an animated avatar repeating everything the cutscene is already saying. Captions are fine as an option, but really just make me feel like I’m being talked down to. I also wasn’t very impressed with the not-so-subtle hints on which character was going to turn out to be the traitor in the end.

On the other hand, I loved almost all the character design in Kameo. I’ve heard a few people being pretty harsh on the game for mixing very violent combat with cutesy cartoony characters. I couldn’t disagree more. Just because Kameo is not for young children, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be young at heart. Ironically the one character design I didn’t like was Kameo herself. Her speaking animations and attire specifically. Her animations somehow manage to simultaneously come off as completely wooden and overly sexual when speaking with other characters. Also, her outfit doesn’t look very practical for flying around in.

Another aspect of Kameo that I’ve really enjoyed are the boss battles, which employ incredibly intricate design requiring you to deftly switch between Kameo’s different battle forms to successfully attack. These battles feel original and challenging without being overly frustrating. No small feat considering how many boss battles we’ve all seen before. You won’t find any hack, slash, repeat gameplay in Kameo.

I also want to mention a couple more things about the graphics and physics in Kameo, especially since I was so hard on Rare for their frame-rate problems in Perfect Dark Zero. There are absolutely no such issues in Kameo. I even tried coming up with unique combinations of particle effects by rapidly cycling through the various battle forms, inundating the game engine with different liquid and fire elements to try and dip the frame rate. It never dipped. Oh yea, and the battle scenes. Holy Crap. I don’t even want to venture a guess on how many characters they had on screen simultaneously. Kameo is free to participate in the full-scale war, or navigate around it as she sees fit. Either choice left my jaw on the floor.

Only my second play rating and I’ve finished Kameo already. The game is short at around ten hours of play. It seems to have good replay value though. Kameo encourages you continue to wander through the world after beating the final boss, even reliving your past glory using magical portraits. A particular post-endgame level challenged me to climb to the top of a ice covered tower, unlocking a special item and more new abilities. Tune into my next play rating were I’ll be revisiting the different levels that offer a coop mode.