PixlBit

Yesterday's journey into the virtual world called Kameo taught me two things: one, that persistence pays off; and two, that it can also be a painful experience. Here are my notes. 

Kameo: Elements of Power: Kameo is a game where you transform into various creatures that have different abilities for traversing the world and fighting enemies. The character designs made me think of: Skylanders, they're both cute and ferocious; Overlord, similar troll design; Fable, I swear they used the same open chest flourish. 

I played this on Xbox 360 years ago and rage quit when I got to the winter land because riding ice slides was a total pain. I don't know why, but it wasn't a problem at all on Xbox One. I did have a problem with the map of that area though becuase I got lost and couldn't get to one of the objectives. I actually quit out of the game and then thought again and returned, only to find myself put near where I wanted to be. Thank you! I continued. 

Kameo is a great game in most respects. The one thing that bugged me from time to time was some movement controls and camera position.

First there was underwater navigation. You can only use one creature for that and it has different movement controls than every other creature you use. So it's not intuitive and took me a while to get the hang of it. Meanwhile I had to fight submarines and a giant boss with these controls. It drove me nearly to the end of my tolerance. Also the camera is positioned behind you at a fixed distance, so when you enter the water, you can't see yourself at all for the first few moments because the camera is exactly at the surface while you are underwater, another niggling annoyance. 

Also, moving objects in the world is a pain. None of the creatures you use can pick up anything freely, so you have to push things around (the gorilla-like creature can pick up enemies and stick them to his back, but that's all). I totally gave up on collecting pearls because it was so difficult trying to roll them in a particular direction. It's like they were covered in slippery slime or something. 

No character can jump. Well, the gorilla-like one can while climbing, but that's not much of a help. At one point I got stuck in a totally uninteresting corridor because I had to get up on this not very high box to get to the exit. Kameo herself can fly but only about four feet above the ground and not over any open space or over any object. The creature that rolls like a ball (man, I can't remember their various names right now) can kind of pop up into the air a little bit very briefly with the right button presses. So I used it and spent like ten minutes trying to get the artificial hop just right. This was in a totally meaningless area that should've been easily traversed. That was another annoyance that brought me to the edge. 

Finally, targeting things. The gorilla-like creature is, I think, the only one that can precisely control a projectile and I needed him for the ice-world boss fight. Pull the left trigger and you go into aim mode but you are immobile. That's kind of annoying when you are being stomped to death by a giant ice beetle! Aside from that, the aiming is sloppy at best, not that you do a lot of it anyway. That boss would wobble about to my extreme annoyance. There's also something with the camera that kind of wobbles too. I'm not sure just what that is, but it's definitely a thing. It's subtle but after hours of gameplay, it can really get annoying. It may be more about the character's movement than the camera though. 

I get it, movement in a varied environment and camera position are probabaly two of the hardest things to pull off in games, especially in a 3D aciton platformer like Kameo. I only ask that swimming be given the same controls as every other type of movement, that characters can always jump over and grab objects in the world, and that the visual frame that you see move smoothly and with precision. I know, it's a tall order, and I'm sure game designers are constantly wrestling with these things. 

So, in sum, I love this game's immense creativity, charm, and wealth of things to do, but there are some moments when the limitations on a character's movement really drive me to distraction. Most of the time I was in rapture playing the game, but there was a good deal of cursing as well.