I used to see this game popup in the gaming magazines all the time, and I always wanted to play it, but I didn't have an Xbox at the time. When I finally had one, I forgot about it. After so many years, to say I'm disappointed is a understatement. Kameo is not bad by any means, but it's not memorable. It feels generic. The story is basically irrelevant, there's no epic moment, at some point the game just ends. For instance, I can't even remember the soundtrack and I just beat it. Technically it feels two generations behind, like a remake of a Nintendo 64 game on Xbox 360. I'm not sure what was the consensus back then, but here, it's easy to understand why Microsoft stopped investing on Rare.

Released in 2005 as Rare's second launch title for the Xbox 360, alongside Perfect Dark Zero. Kameo: Elements of Power is a Rare game through and through, a 3D platformer, full of bright colours, interesting characters and fun gameplay. It started life as a Gamecube game, then moved to original Xbox and finally Xbox 360. It very much feels like a Nintendo game, it dose feel strange playing it on a Microsoft console. However, it stands out among the launch titles as being very different, further expanding what was a very busy launch lineup for the system.

The story of Kameo revolves around the battle of Elves and Goblins, Kameo is a princess of the land whose father has bestowed the power of the elements onto her. Her sister gets jealous, and teams up with the goblin king to take the powers back. It’s not Oscar worthy, but its good enough to move the game forward. Kameo starts the game with all her powers, looses them all, and you must get them all back to defeat your sister.

To start with, Kameo looks fantastic, for a game that was due to release on the original Xbox and was 80% complete when the decision was made to transfer it to 360, the game looks very impressive. This really would be the game to show off your new console to your friends. Lighting, texture work, is beautiful, and it all runs at a decent framerate.

The gameplay revolves around Kameo an elf who can glide, and use the elemental powers to transform into different elemental forms and use their powers to fight through environments. All of them are well designed and fun to use, unlocking them allows to access parts of the game that you could not before, and you will often need to combine them to achieve your goals, which is great fun. The game is semi open world, with a large battle going on in the middle and various “lands” off of this that you go to, to unlock the various elemental powers. Its impressive stuff, there are hundreds of npcs on screen at one time, we have seen nothing like this on console before. The world reminds me of Ocarina of time, with one large open area, and the various dungeons, surrounding it. Each dungeon is well designed with a final boss fine, they all follow the same routine, and much like Zelda the bosses are never too difficult once you know how to defeat them. It’s a rather linier game, there’s not many hidden or secret areas to discover with your new powers.

There is also a co-op mode available for the game where you can invite friends into the game to play co-op states, both of you able to use the powers at the same time, mixing and matching as you go. Its really quite good fun and the DLC stages are still available. Kameo has a score meter, you gain points for combos and not getting hit, and they are all uploaded to the XBL scoreboards, its makes for some good replay ability, despite the linier focus of the main game.

Kameo’s biggest issue is that it lacks a bit of character. Despite being well designed, none of the elemental powers say anything or show any real personality. Kameo herself has few lines of dialog and what is here is nothing great, the case of side characters are nothing to write home about either. Which for my money is a big issue for a 3D platformer.
Despite this I had good fun with Kameo, I enjoyed my playthrough and looked forward to coming back to it, but once it was done I never felt the need to go back to it. The co-op is really good fun and the game is certainly eye-candy for 2005. Overall a solid experience, lacking a bit of character and replay ability.

7.5/10

I'm blown away by how excruciating this game is.

Everything about it is laborious, like a relic of the worst elements of 3D platformers made years prior, with none of the charm. The controls feel like you're swimming through molasses and had me double checking to make sure I didn't accidentally turn off game mode on my TV.

Lead designer George Andreas later stated they should have scrapped Kameo and started over, and I have to agree. Its troubled development really shows and it's hard to believe Rare could make a game this bad.

Rare’s take on an epic fantasy, Kameo: Elements of Power gives us a story of Elves and trolls, although interestingly, there are no humans in this world. I also quite like their take on Trolls. While they’re still brutish and strong, they’re not done so in the typical “dumb” way, instead they focus on science and technology, creating impressive weaponary for you to fight.

The elves are also not typical elves, and seem more like fairies, due to having wings. Wings won’t help Kameo jump over large gaps, but do allow for very fast movement, allowing areas to feel large without it taking too long to get anywhere. Each area you visit also has interesting creatures living there, it’s surprisingly quite a fascinating world.

The story itself isn’t as unique, though, and is fairly predictable. Kameo’s sister turns evil due to jealousy, wakes up the baddest trolland kidnaps their family. It’s very cheesy, especially one character used for a sequel bait twist near the end who practically announced that they’re secretly evil the first time you meet them, but still charming enough to be serviceable.

The main feature of Kameo: Elements of Power are the Elemental Warriors. These are spirits of creatures in various forms of Rock, Fire, Ice, Water and Plant, with two for each type. Each one has a fantastic design and they all feel very different to play, with their own moveset. You can upgrade each one using elemental fruit hidden throughout the lands (and are often rewards for side-quests).

While this is structured similar to a Zelda game: a hub area, village area with quests and then a dungeon ending in a boss, there’s a lot more focus on combat and navigating the world. In combat, you earn points for dispatching enemies quickly, and you’ll need to learn which Warriors are effective at dispatching what enemies – some need a certain element to combat them. There’s a wide array of enemies, all of which are very easy to identify, so you can quickly analyse a situation and choose which warriors you need. You change into these with the B, Y and X buttons.

My only issue with this setup is that it means you’ll be changing warriors a lot. There’s a quick select option if you hold down one of the buttons, but because it doesn’t pause or slow down the game, it’s useless in combat. The way forward is also very strict, you always need a specific Elemental Warrior to progress. Unfortunately, the game rarely allows you to experiment outside of combat. I also wish that some of them were utilised more, as a couple such a Rubble (a heap of rocks that can fire bits of itself), Flex (a stretchy water creature which is a hookshot with limited grapple points) and 40 Below (a menacing ice creature riding a giant snowball) aren’t used much outside of their initial areas.

This is especially true for the final section, which focuses mainly on a couple of these creatures. I feel like each needed its own “power moment” to celebrate them all at the end. There could also have been a few more combinations of utilising different powers. Even with this, you do get a bit of leeway in fights and can experiment a bit more there.

Between each dungeon, you’ll encounter large battles in the Badlands, where the trolls are trying to destroy the shrines protecting your kingdom. The scale of these battles is impressive, with hundreds of elves and trolls doing battle. Even now, the amount of creatures on-screen is an impressive sight. As the main bulk of trolls are focused on your elf army, you can still zip around to where you’re needed the most and concentrate on the important part of the fight.

Accompanying you on this journey is a mystical wizard in a tome called the “Wotnot Book”, this game’s Navi. My advice for this is to go into the options straight away and turn him off, as he’ll constantly be giving you advice and nagging you to talk to him, although he does get some entertaining lines in the cutscenes.

The music in Kameo is also amazing. It’s Rare’s first orchestrated soundtrack and it features epic sounding tunes with strong instruments and choirs. It makes each moment feel epic.

While Kameo: Elements of Power has its problems – mainly not letting you experiment more with the Warriors – it’s still a great fantasy game, one that probably gets overlooked these days. It will never happen, but I would love to see a sequel with more refined…elements.

It is not very common that a game's development transcends four different consoles and eventually does live to see the day as a final product.

Kameo: Elements of Power is a game Rare carried over through the years and finally met its fate on the XBOX360 as a launch title. The concept involves you playing as a fairy named Kameo that can transform into different creatures of respective elemental powers such as rocks, plants, ice, and fire.

On paper this is a great concept, unfortunately on execution is very, very rough. The game has a lot of linear map exploration with puzzle solving involving your magical allies. Alas, plenty of the detection can be very buggy, and while I can see the cleverness behind some boss battle mechanisms and dungeon situations, it feels like it needed further user experience revisions to go around, but it's likely Microsoft had run out of patience for this long lingering project and the release of the XBOX360 was just around the corner.

This is one of those cases I can feel the ambitious intentions of the developer, but it just needs more polish. I would say that if you are a hardcore fan of Rare it is at least worth a look, but it is honestly fairly difficult to make a straight upfront recommendation.