Leedmees (Xbox 360)

The Kinect motion sensing camera promises that your body is now the controller, but it often doesn’t feel like the whole body is really that involved. Oftentimes it’s about what your hands and arms are up to, and maybe the game might get you a bit more involved with a brief jump or some repositioning. In the Kinect puzzle game Leedmees though, your entire body is indeed vital to the gameplay, because the only way the little humanoid creatures are going to get to their goal is by walking across you.

 

Leedmees has little story, just introducing the idea that somehow you have been thrown into another world inhabited by the titular Leedmees. Leedmees are tiny human-like beings that are all white save for their eyes and it falls on you to help them go from a blue portal they enter an area through to a red exit portal. You cannot control the Leedmees in any way as they march along automatically, but entering this world has turned you into a giant, meaning you can use your arms like a bridge to carry them over gaps and protect them from danger. Across the game’s 50 levels as well as 12 bonus levels you can only tackle by having another player join you, you will need to move your real life body to position it properly so Leedmees can traverse it to safety, but thankfully you don’t need to be perfect to clear a stage. Most levels only require you to get around half of the Leedmees to the goal to beat the stage and there are also five golden stars you can grab as an optional task. You do not need any stars at all to complete the adventure and you must rely on Leedmees to carry them, each one only able to carry a star each. Much of the time these stars ask you to be more involved in how you move the little characters around to reach them and can serve as an extra layer of difficulty should you seek it.

Leedmees is actually pretty creative with coming up with ways to evolve the concept of making a bridge out of your body. Your head is thankfully not an obstruction and you can actually pass your arms through platforms to reach the Leedmees more easily, but over time things will change to add new complicating factors. Sometimes you’ll need to position your legs properly to be able to do things like activate switches. Other times you may actually have to use yourself to bridge a circuit, putting your arms and legs near light bulbs so electricity can freely flow through you to activate mechanisms. There are simple ideas at play like needing to make sure you control when Leedmees move so they don’t get stabbed by large spears and others are a little silly like needing to manage the little characters while you’re bombarded with balls that start filling the area. There are levels where the danger is to you instead of your little companions, ghosts able to cause your body to crumble should they reach your face and you must either plan your routes accordingly or try to fan them away without knocking those creatures riding your body off. Leedmees can even start to get a little mind-bending when it introduces levels where your on-screen movement is the opposite of real life. It’s one thing to realize you need to reverse which buttons you press in a normal game, but when you have to move your actual body in the opposite way of what should conceivably work, it can be quite difficult to maintain that mindset and successfully save enough Leedmees to beat the level.

 

Leedmees are surprisingly fragile creatures though, a long enough fall or too much pressure able to make them pop into colorful sparkles. You can even accidentally squish them as you move around or you might possibly fling them by mistake if you move too quickly, and some risk in handling them is too be expected. There are levels in Leedmees that are difficult to figure out and even more difficult when you consider the safety of the little creatures you’re trying to safely ferry to the exit, and when you can finally concoct a safe way to navigate them around the dangers and clear the stage, it can come with a surge of satisfaction because you had to both solve the puzzle of safe movement and actually perform the required actions with your body to execute it.

Sadly, the Leedmees being so easy to accidentally kill is also what keeps the game from being more consistently effective. One downside of using your whole body as a platform for moving the Leedmees around is the Kinect can both pick up on small movements and fail to consider others. Some stages tell you that squatting might help when you want to get around high obstructions but the camera is pretty poor at detecting it and then you might have to do a crabwalk of sorts after anyway that is not fun to try and pull off with finesse. If some Leedmees end up around your feet, you can get them up to a higher level by holding your arm down for them to jump up and grab, but the detection for this seems to be the poorest of all and even if they do grab on, actually getting them up on your arms after sometimes fails as well. Merely moving with Leedmees aboard sometimes comes in conflict with the fact the human body isn’t a rigid structure. Take more than a tiny step to the side and your whole body will have to adjust to compensate the shifting balance, meaning Leedmees might tumble off or smack into structures. Even if you learn to be cautious, there are still times where you’re trying to ever so lightly bend your arms or tip in a direction and the game doesn’t seem to read it very well. To go for saving every Leedmees and grabbing every star loses a great deal of its appeal and feels almost masochistic once you come to learn the camera sometimes demands perfection and yet can’t always read your movements as closely as it needs to in order to achieve it.

 

There are definitely levels that are dragged down because they were built around precise action, something that is hampered a touch more by the fact that every level has a timer that will automatically fail you should you not save enough Leedmees in time. The way Leedmees spawn into a level is often based on both time and what happened to the previous little characters, meaning if you aren’t fast enough moving them around sometimes you might find in the more complicated levels it’s actually wise to just kill the first few since the later spawns will usually have them appear in small groups rather than slowly one by one. Moments of triumph that come from figuring out tougher levels are definitely rarer than bog standard stages or the ones where you get through the bare minimum Leedmees and then consider slaughtering the rest just to be done with it, the memory of frustrating misreads of your motions when things do get too demanding starting to erase your enthusiasm despite the constant show of creativity in terms of the obstacles you need to overcome.

THE VERDICT: Leedmees is a pretty clever game, inventing many different complications that make moving your body to serve as a platform or barrier for Leedmees a more thoughtful and sometimes difficult challenge. However, that creativity comes with a price as the Kinect camera starts to have issues keeping up, the game wanting bodies to sometimes move with rigid precision while it can be hard to parse how much you need to move for the Kinect to read your intent. With a timer and time sensitive actions to worry about, you can end up making mistakes just trying to ensure accuracy, and while there are some stages that put you to the test in a way that is thrilling to overcome, you more often run into either safe and unassuming levels or ones where your little passengers meet unfortunate fates because the game can be a little too testy in reading your movements.

 

And so, I give Leedmees for Xbox 360…

A BAD rating. I nearly considered giving Leedmees and Okay rating because it has plenty of decent stages and those standout moments where you are putting both body and mind to work overcoming a tough but fair trial. However, that would involve ignoring the levels where it felt like meeting the bare minimum for success was a chore because I could not trust the motion sensing, and the Kinect ends up making the optional pursuit of going for stars and saving every one of the little creatures sound excruciating. It is interesting that Leedmees nearly accounted for its fundamental flaw with the level clearing quota not being too bad but then a timer is added in to almost force errors in more complicated levels, and while everything is displayed on screen at once, the need to move your whole body feels like it leads to some of the common failure points like the game’s weak reading of movement momentum. The idea of Leedmees is fun and it feels like a broken record to blame the Kinect technology for a game’s failings, but Konami should have designed around those limits in it detecting your posing and positioning either in the level design or how easy it is to kill Leedmees by mistake. The fact they do such a terrible job jumping up onto your arms when you reach down for them feels unforgivable, it would be better to ask us to bend down and tap them perhaps, but as the game implies with it suggesting you squat to lower yourself, bending forward is a motion the Kinect struggles with detecting.

 

Leedmees does have moments where it succeeds quite well because the Kinect isn’t exactly failed hardware. Like any game system or device, you need to plan for what it can actually do, and in the levels that feel like it’s more about working around specific obstacles with the right choices, Leedmees succeeds in being an enjoyable Kinect game. It’s not like a video game will divide up levels based on how good they are though, so you’ll not get to appreciate its successes too well as you deal with levels where little slip-ups force frequent restarts. Maybe one day some device like the Kinect will truly read the human body’s movements properly and Leedmees can be revived on there where it would actually be pretty decent, but right now it’s just a nice idea that didn’t survive contact with the technology of 2011.