Which brings you to the ever evolving challenges of the game. You see as the adventuring becomes much more difficult, you must figure out which Elementals to have at the ready to activate. You never know when you must use the Rolling power of Major Ruin to launch into the air only to transform into the ice wall climing Chilla and stick to the wall lest you fall to your death. And that is only a small example of the quick finger acrobatics that the game demands of you.
Of course that isn’t the only way to get an Elemental, rescuing one of your family can sometimes result in them giving you a new friend. And don’t even think that the game only involves you running from one Shadow Troll lair to the other. Oh no, events are unfolding as you run around and often the soldiers will ask you to help them at a critical stage of the war. Which brings in a series of cool action scenarios. The most memorable one involved me turning into the Dragon Ash and defending an Elvish artillery from attack as the elves turn the cannons in the appropriate direction to stop a troll warship. And it’s these scenarios that break up a game that could potentially become monotonous (yet never does)
But does it look and sound good?
Being in the first wave of 360 games, it is expected that all of the games be above board as far as what they look like and sound like. Well I must say that Kameo is really a fine looking title. I spoke about it briefly in my review of the 360 itself and I think that it is a testament of what’s to come in the future. Being a launch title Kameo still has the chops to clearly place it above even the best looking original Xbox or PS2 title. Why? Well, lets talk about that for a minute.
Using an almost cartoonish look (cell shading) but not quite a full cartoon, Kameo features a very fluid and smooth design. Each individual item, whether it’s a rock on the ground or a major character, has very clean and distinctive lines. You can easily distinguish one item from another even a large distances (which we’ll discuss further down). For example, during one sequence (actually it happens several times), Kameo is required to mount a horse and quickly ride to a distant location. As she rides, you can marvel at all the beautiful scenery, but what’s that up ahead? Looks like it’s a crowd of people mosh pitting. And as you get closer it is a crowd of people, only they aren’t dancing, they are fighting. And even though you whip by at a healthy 60 FPS, you can still see the detail in the Trolls’ battle axes and the Elven warriors armor. It’s a real hoot to try and smash into the bad guys with a giant war horse and the clean graphics never bog down even with a ton of action happening on screen.
Now something that I still can’t get over is how well things are viewed in this title no matter the distance. I talked about the fights at great distances, but you really do feel enveloped in a great battle when you can see a giant war machine rumbling across the field with Trolls hanging off it, and past that, the destoyed and burning remains of another war machine that has been felled, and even beyond that the mountains and then the clouds and eventually the sky and moon. I know for a fact that the programmers really took advantage of what the 360 can do and spread out all that graphic specific memory. Playing in HDTV 720p is just awesome, just plain awesome.
