Kameo - Final Play: Coop and Beyond
Where there is no coop play, gamers will invent some. Example: my brother and his best friend invented an ingenious method of cooperative play using the Nintendo 64 version of Golden Eye. I’m sure they weren’t the only ones. Golden Eye had a control scheme that used both controllers. It was intended to be played holding one controller in each hand, giving you the equivalent of today’s dual analog stick controllers. However, hand a controller to each player and you have instant cooperative play. I’m still amazed watching my brother and his friend doing this, the level of coordination is unprecedented and the subjects of the inevitable arguments are hilarious.
“Strafe left.”
“No, wait, backup.”
“Quit looking at the floor!”
“Switch to the Magnum.”
“Shoot him! Shoot him!”
The moral of this story was not lost on game developers who currently tack on cooperative modes to any game that has the remotest chance of supporting them. Unfortunately, Kameo’s coop is no exception, and ends up feeling like a tacked on feature.
Kameo coop mode is accessed through a series of overly tricky GUI elements that left us aimlessly searching for the “go” button. After figuring this out, our next disappointment was that coop is limited only to the dungeon sections of Kameo, leaving out most of the beautifully designed world. Also, the fantastically rendered backdrop of the huge troll battle is not included. My friend and I sulked a bit over these omissions, and then moved on to attack the coop levels.
One of many tricky decisions for any next-gen developer sizing up that 16:9 widescreen display is whether to split vertically or horizontally. Rare chose to split Kameo right down the middle in 16:9 mode and I found myself feeling more than a little claustrophobic as a result. Kameo tends to throw a lot of enemies at you at once, and the loss of all that peripheral vision is painful. I found myself spending a good portion of my coop experience spinning around trying to check my 6.
A large portion of the amusement my friend and I had with coop Kameo came from the combination attacks. In single player mode, executing a combination attack requires rapidly switching between Kameo’s elemental forms. However, in coop, the combinations become much easier to pull off. Our absolute favorite method of attack was to use Deep Blue’s oil slick in combination with Ashes’ fire attack. The result is a copious amount of flaming napalm, which also happens to be one of the most satisfying video game attacks of all time (right up there with Lui Kang’s dragon finishing move). We amused ourselves for hours squirting out oil slicks and igniting them. Since the oil realistically floats on water, certain The Crow quotes concerning Lake Erie catching fire are appropriate if used in moderation.
Kameo coop suffers from frequent warping points, which Halo players will immediately recognize. Warping points teleport your partner to your current location when a certain threshold is passed. They serve the dual purpose of denoting the exact limitations of the 360’s memory capacity while being terribly frustrating for your partner who was just about to set off his patented triple troll combination. However, we were thankful that the warping points in Kameo were clearing marked instead of appearing out of the blue as they did in Halo.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to mention something I’d forgotten in my previous play ratings. Game soundtracks, especially orchestral ones, are often bland or even outright boring affairs. When music as good as Kameo’s kicks in the experience is a notable one. The various themes are put together nicely and convey the emotional background of the game. The recurring battle theme is especially prominent, I even found myself humming it on several occasions.
Overall, my experience with Kameo has been very short, but positive. Rare has taken some fantastic art design and locked it up tight with satisfying physics-powered combat. However, I wouldn’t have minded if Rare had taken a little more time to move the architecture and set designs further from a dead-on copy of World of Warcraft and Zelda. After Rare’s disappointing Perfect Dark Zero, Kameo is a remarkable relief. Keep up the good work.