George Andreas, senior designer at Microsoft Game Studios developer Rare Limited, gave us a demo of the Xbox 360 launch title Kameo: Elements of Power.
In short, the game looks and sounds excellent.
Kameo has an atmospheric richness that makes it feel more like an epic RPG than a frenetic action game. The game?s environments are attentively lavished with detail, from the 3D-looking cobblestones under Kameo?s feet, to the mountain ranges that appear to be miles in the distance. Kameo, the main character, feels like a cross between Lara Croft and Pocohantas and Mulan. She?s got an ethnicity that?s hard to pin down: Asian eyes, vaguely American Indian costumes and facial features, dumps like a truck, and an impossible Croft-like waist-hip ratio that?s shown to great effect when she enters her idle animation and shakes what her designers gave her. She?s pleasant on the eyes.
The player is given a few primary motivations. One is to collect all 10 alternate characters with different abilities. There?s a boxing plant, a rock armadillo with Katamari Damacy-like moves, a lavabomb-hurling fire ant, an ice yeti, an octopus, a battering-ram horse, a pile of rocks, and so on. As Kameo progresses through the game she collects these warriors and must keep switching between them in order to keep progressing. That?s pretty much the only collection a player must do, thankfully. Enemies don?t drop coins and the player doesn?t have to find potions, keys or manage bag inventory.
Another motivator for the player is the game?s story, plot and character development. Rare has invested in writing, voice acting (they?ve hired professional voice actors for the first time) and lip synching in order to match the immersive and beautiful scenery with sounds and story to match.
The boss fights unfold like the archetypical Megaman boss fights of yore. Faced with a gigantic, robotic knight fueled by a fire-burning engine, Andreas switched to the ice Yeti warrior and shot icicles into the hatch when the boss presented an opening. He had to use a few other warriors to get the job done, so it wasn?t simplistic or mindless, but it was a tad predictable.
There was no hint here of the dated graphics that one might expect in a game that was first conceived in 2000 and was initially intended for the GameCube platform. However, the team still has a bit of work before the title is launch ready. One attempt to depict an epic battlefield crowded with many thousands of orcs fell flat. The number of on-screen enemies was very impressive (and could not be accomplished on current-generation hardware), but the effect was cheapened by the fact that the orcs were all moving in time with each other. Imagine thousands of orcs perfectly spaced across a battlefield raising their right arms in rage all at precisely the same moment. We?d expect this to be remedied in the final version of the game so it?s probably not fair to pick on it.
We got nearly an hour?s worth of demo time of the game, but that 80-man orchestral soundtrack was blaring so loudly that we didn?t really have the opportunity to ask all of the juicy questions we wanted to ask the game?s designer. You have escaped this time, George Andreas!
