Whether Rare has been a worthwhile investment for Microsoft to date remains to be seen; Grabbed By The Ghoulies was fun enough without being anything special, and the much delayed N64 remake Conker: Live & Reloaded failed to hit the mark both critically or in terms of sales. But with the Xbox 360 comes not one but *two* Rare games as launch titles; both games originally destined to be Gamecube games, one based on an existing Nintendo title, and one all new effort, titled Kameo: Elements of Power.

Kameo is another sore-point for some gamers - originally destined for the original Xbox, Microsoft opted to delay the title for more than half a year and brand it as an Xbox 360 exclusive title. Truthfully, the game still shows its Xbox roots, and there's absolutely no reason the game couldn't have worked perfectly on the older hardware with a few technical changes. But there's no use whinging about it; Kameo is here on 360 and despite the long wait and a few minor gripes, it's an enjoyable, thoroughly competent effort that really shows what the team at Rare is capable of, without blowing you out of the water.

Kameo's story is a pretty standard fantasy fare; an Elfin princess is forced to stop the forces of darkness after a family betrayal awakens an old enemy. The game touches on themes of magic versus technology - the Elves rely heavily on the arcane to assert their dominance over the world, while the Trolls require technology and machinery to better themselves. It's a pretty black & white affair though, and while there are a few twists and turns along the way, for the most part the story is only there to send you from A to B.

As the subtitle infers, Kameo revolves around the elements; the Elven homeland of the Enchanted Kingdom is protected by four elemental shields: earth, fire, water and ice. It's about as original as the crap in the Top 40 music charts, but it works pretty well here. Kameo herself is incredibly weak, so she relies on capturing elemental sprites that grant her the ability to shapeshift into some extremely powerful elemental warriors. There are ten of these guys, two for each of the five elements listed above. Kameo is so utterly insipid a character that you'll spend as much time as possible in elemental form, of which you can have three at the ready.

The X, Y and B buttons are user-mapped to whichever elemental warriors you want to use, while the A button doubles as the back-to-Kameo button, as well as the general action/interaction command. To utilise the abilities of your warriors you'll be using the left & right triggers in various combinations, and while it can get a little confusing (particularly towards the endgame when you've got ten warriors at your disposal), overall it's a pretty intuitive system. Fans of Platformers will probably find it the most jarring since they're used to the face buttons doing all the work, but for FPS nuts it'll be second nature.

The real fun comes from exploring what each of your elemental warriors can do and how they interact with one another. For instance, if you combine the squid-like Deep Blue's oil-slick ability with the fiery breath of the red dragon Ash, you can create a flamethrower effect, or create a literal firewall between yourself and the enemy. The biggest problem here is that there isn't as many of these clever combinations as you might expect - there's a solid elemental interplay at work with the enemies, but you won't have that many opportunities to mix it up amongst your elemental warriors.

On the other hand, there's a few tag-team moves that Kameo overuses during the singleplayer campaign: the amount of times Major Ruin has to spin into a ball to get airborne so Chilla can grab an ice-wall is borderline annoying. But for the combat portion of the game, it's quite rewarding to discover new ways to take down your adversaries. And despite what you might have seen in previews, Kameo is very much about the combat to the point where the platforming elements are few and far between.

It's lucky then, that combat is a real hoot, thanks to the sheer variety of ways in which to dispatch the game's host of villains. One minute you'll be beating the snot out of trolls with the fighting-flower Pummelweed, the next you'll be skewering your foes to the icy spikes on Chilla and then using them as a club. Kameo rewards vicious violence with points that admittedly have no impact on the solo mode of the game, and are only useful for the score attack game. It would've been great to see Rare take the combo-combat in a more inventive direction, maybe naming cross-element combos ala X-Men: Legends, or at least making it have some sort of benefit to the story portion of the game.

In an effort to bolster the longevity of Kameo, Rare have included a score attack mode that encourages players to revisit the key battle sequences of the game and fight for points, to unlock both in-game bonuses as well as Gamerscore Achievements. For 90% of players, this will hold about as much appeal as having to rewrite a high-school essay, but it can be fun to get away from the story and just smack some Trolls around. The bonuses are alright too, and include skins, concept art galleries, cheats, and music/video players. There's certainly a lot here for completists, but nothing remarkable enough to sink much time into the score mode.

Kameo is really more of an adventure game than a platformer, and as such there's a lite role-playing element that revolves around upgrading or enhancing your elemental warriors. There are 100 pieces of enchanted fruit hidden in the game that can be found by exploring or completing side-quests for characters. Find enough, and you can feed them to your warriors to get new abilities or improve the old ones. Unless you're thorough, you probably won't find enough to fully pimp all your warrior-homies, so you'll have to decide what abilities you need or might suit your playing style. If you *do* somehow manage to find them all - along with the Elixirs of life and a quartet of magic eyes - you'll earn another Achievement for being such a completist, which is nice.

Even though platforming isn't a huge part of Kameo, there's a lot of exploring to do, and a lot of places where platform-style navigation is required, even if you aren't jumping from floating blocks or any of the usual suspects. It's here where Kameo's controls fall down a little; they aren't particularly precise, and executing specific moves - particularly those requiring a left+right trigger combo - often ends up being an exercise in frustration. There's no lock-on or anything in combat either, and when you need to switch to first-person targeting, you will often find your warrior isn't even looking in the vague direction of a bad-guy.

The other problem is that a lot of your warriors are criminally under-utilised, and some feel like they've got one or two sections that were thrown in just so the developers could say they did. This isn't a Zelda-esque effort where the game is so well designed and engaging that you'll voluntarily want to back-track to see what your new abilities might have discovered. On the rare occasion you are required to revisit an area, the game explicitly tells you where to go and what to look for.

Fumbling controls and hand-holding aside, Kameo is an extremely polished product. There were no noticeable glitches or bugs in the story mode (cynics may argue that after years in development and two platform-changes there wouldn't want to be any hiccups), and the framerate is rock solid. The visuals are great, making good use of the higher definition textures and graphical tricks available. As unoriginal as elemental areas are, Rare manage to make each location look vibrant and alive. Galloping around the Badlands on horseback is not only breathtaking, but really makes you feel like you're in the middle of a much larger battle going on around you. There's literally hundreds of units on-screen at any time, and often there will be giant war-engines, dragons and magic flying around as well.

Yet as good as Kameo looks, you just can't escape the feeling that this is just a tarted-up Xbox game. While the horseback-riding, epic scale battles would've certainly taxed the ol' black box, there's no reason it couldn't have worked perfectly well on the old hardware 12-18 months ago. It also feels a little unfinished in places - your first few elemental warriors evolve visually when you upgrade them with elemental fruits, but the last half or more don't change at all, which is disappointing.

Kameo sounds pretty decent, but again, there's nothing at all remarkable about the effects or soundtrack. The music sounds like pretty generic fantasy fare (although a few tracks bear an uncanny similarity to Morrowind and Oblivion which can only be a good thing), and ironically the best tracks in the game never play during the game per se; you can only hear them on the jukebox or via the music player. Kameo sounds pretty ridiculous, like an English-New Jersey hybrid...the rest of the characters have been recorded to bog-standard fantasy archetype quality, which is a little disappointing.

Most of Kameo's Achievements come from singleplayer efforts: 20 points apiece for each of the elemental warriors, 50-100 for beating bosses and other key efforts. The rest come from score attack or co-operative play, which is essentially just two-player score attack. Rare have recently released a patch and update for Kameo, which adds Xbox Live co-op, so now you can play online with your friends. A few of the Achievements are now for online matches as well, so you kinda *have* to play with friends if you want your full 1000 points.