Leedmees is one of the few XBLA games so far to require the Kinect peripheral, Fruit Ninja Kinect being its best-known predecessor. Nobody could expect an obscure, under-advertised title from Konami to reach Halfbrick’s lofty fruit-slicing heights, but it might have at least been decent. Sadly it doesn't even approach decent, but it's not for the lack of a clever premise.
Leedmees’ concept, a Lemmings-style game in which players direct troops of hapless creatures into a goal using their own bodies, certainly peaked my interest. Leedmees are little white guys who walk in a straight line no matter what danger lies ahead. They’ll turn around if they hit a wall, and that’s the extent of their intelligence. Players control a giant cave-drawing like figure whose movements more or less match our own. Scoop a Leedmee up in your arm and he’ll walk along it. You can let him walk off, drop him by angling your arm sharply down, or keep him boxed in by forming a football goal-post shape with your arms. Thus, as Leedmees drop in groups of 1-6 from their spawn point, players just have to carry them along the level and to the goal without smashing into anything dangerous.
Had the game only involved doing things with your arms, it probably would have turned out alright. But the third level introduces a new mechanic: picking Leedmees up off the ground. To do this, we’re told to bend our knees down, keeping our backs straight, and bend a hand way down low for the little critters to jump up and cling to. Hmm. I don’t know about you, but many people have trouble bending at the knees repeatedly, especially while keeping their backs straight. I can handle my share of squats, but the game, on the other hand, absolutely cannot. The great majority of the time, when I or my partner bent to pick up a Leedmee, our on-screen avatars would spazz out, legs going wild or bodies moving in completely unrelated directions.
I sometimes managed to pick up Leedmees from the ground by tilting my body to the side without bending my knees (hurting my back, ouch). But in both situations, Leedmees failed to track my hands properly when they got low. The on-screen avatar’s hand would often freeze in place at too-high angles or just spazz out, killing Leedmees. If only the little guys could jump about twice as high, the bending problem would have been circumvented. But they can’t, so the broken mechanic makes levels that require it (about 1/5 of the game) painful in every sense of the word.
Leedmees’ motion-control shortcomings wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t have a challenging game wrapped around them. First off, each level has a time limit of two minutes, so taking your time is seldom an option. Worse, the Leedmees are just too fragile. Every little thing kills them – moving your arms too fast, squishing them against your body or your partner’s, stepping on them or bumping them with your feet, squishing them against your head… That last one is particularly annoying as Leedmees often walk from one arm to another, right through the player’s head, but other times will be crushed against it. They also have a tendency to randomly shoot off of your body for no discernible reason, always resulting in untimely death. Unacceptable. Leedmees would probably still be a passable game despite the broken controls if the Leedmees weren’t so apt to die or vice versa, but the combination of the two renders it just about unplayable.
As little fun as the main game’s 50 levels provide, Leedmees does also include 12 local co-op levels. Both players have their own avatar and the levels are completely built with teamwork and communication in mind. Leedmees alternatingly drop from both sides of the screen, so each player will need to catch them in turn. The goal often appears on one player’s body, requiring the other person to pass the Leedmees onto whatever part holds the exit.
Various obstacles from the main game pop up in multiplayer, such as ghosts that must be ‘blown away’ by waving your arms at them, or switches that you punch or step on to move blocks out of the Leedmees’ paths. Other times we had to complete electrical circuits with our bodies, placing our hands and feet on specific spots and then making sure our characters’ hands connected.
I applaud the cleverness of these elements, but the erratic controls and tendency of the Leedmees to die for little or no reason drags co-op down just as much as single-player. Only now, two people get to share in the aggravation instead of just one! Plus only the first player earns Achievements, so the second player suffers for absolutely no reward.
Now’s a good time to mention Leedmees’ ranking system. Depending on how many Leedmees make it to a level’s goal, the game awards a letter grade. To get the coveted S-Rank, the Leedmees must collect all five stars scattered about the level and every single one must survive. Because five of the game’s 12 Achievements are tied to S-Ranks (some single-player, some co-op), S really is the only letter grade that matters. Lose one Leedmee in a level and the S-Rank is out. The result? Once we had enough Leedmees into the goal to move on to the next level, we just killed the rest of the creeps in order to finish the level faster. It’s pretty bad when the game is set up so that if you make even one mistake (and remember, it’s almost always the controls at fault), you might as well just give up and try to get out of there.
I recently had the pleasure of reviewing The Gunstringer, which I called the best Kinect game yet. Leedmees is the polar opposite – the single worst Kinect game I’ve experienced. In fact, it’s the second worst of the hundred-plus XBLA titles I have played (Totemball being the worst). It didn't have to be this way. With an original concept, a distinctive art style, interesting level design, and unique co-op levels, Konami’s downloadable Kinect title should have been a great little family game. Instead, Leedmees truly feels like it was released without being playtested. Co-op is slightly less painful than single-player, but it doesn't save the game. I'm afraid it would take a serious patch to fix all of the game’s woes, and given its poor sales, that seems unlikely.