Legend of Kay Anniversary Review

Unsurprisingly, this is also a hindrance to the combat, which has the virtue of at least being enjoyable in places. If you’re like me and you’ve been spoiled silly by the likes of Platinum Games, then Kay’s movement is going to feel as smooth and fluid as running around in a pair of waterlogged oversized wellingtons, but once you get a handle on that - and unlock enough of his kit - it feels pretty good to zip around in a blur of fur and whirling claws, catching enemies off-guard and punishing them before they can attack. The main gimmick is that once you get a combo started you can jump to enemies with a vaguely proto-Arkham-ish leap, which certainly gives Kay some much needed mobility and serves as a dodge move of sorts, but I wonder if this system was really thought out given that there’s no reward for having a high combo or keeping one maintained, just getting it started in the first place. Enemies can go all panicky and start fighting defensively in certain cases, which sounds like a neat AI feature until you realise you have to constantly chase down the cowardly little sods like a disgruntled groundskeeper, and the only way to deal with excessively blocking enemies is to pull off the abominably clunky roll move to get behind them. There also isn’t really any cancelling or countering to speak of, so in any fight with more than a handful of enemies the only viable strategy is to either run around looking for opportunistic single hits or hope to get yourself positioned just right for an area-of-effect magic attack. I’m not asking for Devil May Cry mechanics over here, but it really does feel like Kay’s skillset doesn’t quite match the situations he gets thrown into. And for crying out loud, why does there have to be so much dreadful back-and-forth banter before every single fight? Even if Kay wasn’t voiced by a kid who could only sound less intimidating if he turned up to the recording studio with a stuffy nose, it wouldn’t excuse the fact that this game’s idea of rapier wit is the equivalent of two beer-bellied men slapping each other with pool noodles at a Sunday barbecue.

Of course, that’s hardly the limit of the writing’s problems. You can tell this was the kind of game where the writer spent many sleepless nights putting together a plot, restlessly editing for hours on end, only to discover about halfway through development that most of it would have to be burned because the powers that be wanted to be able to slap “25 different levels with over twelve hours of gameplay” on the back of the box at any expense. It’s the kind of story that’s been twisted and stretched to serve the level structures; the kind of plot that would probably take about twenty minutes at the most to play out if it wasn’t for the number of roadblocks that get regularly airdropped into your path. “Oh no, the [PLOT EVENT] is through this door, but we can’t reach it because [HITHERTO UNKNOWN OBSTACLE]. Guess you’ll have to make some detours to [DUNGEON/SIDE-AREA/ANIMAL RIDING SECTION], then!” At one point - and I swear this is true - you fight your way through a ruined palace and its assorted burial chambers to find a nautical map, because despite the presence of a trained crew and a functioning ship, not a single person in this entire city thought to make a photocopy of it. Even the expository opening, in the town that stubbornly refuses to undergo a character-building tragedy, is less of a quick hook and more of a slow, drawn out drag across a thick carpet, as every single meaningful mechanic gets spelled out with patronising slowness. Why? Kids aren’t that stupid, you know. I’m pretty sure if they can figure out automatic redstone farming machines then they can figure out combo attacks without chewing off the thumbstick.

I hope you understand by now why I’m a little bit perplexed as to Legend of Kay Anniversary’s existence: it’s an HD re-release of a game that was merely average to start with, and has only grown dusty with age. It doesn’t serve as a lesson on what modern design has forgotten so much as it serves as a checklist of features we buried because they were evolutionary dead-ends. I, for one, don’t want to see another fixed-speed animal riding section for as long as I live, and while the prevalence of open-world design might have more unhealthy side-effects than making a morning smoothie out of the contents of the medicine cabinet, at least the terrain you backtrack across as you fulfil your fetch quests is interesting enough to warrant covering more than once. Every time I stumbled into a not-so-linear area, I knew without fail that the game would stretch it to breaking point with a shopping list of minor variations on the theme of ‘find the switches’ and ‘find the keys’, a buffet of slag livened up only by the enemies who respawn when you’re out of sight and the moments where you have to arbitrarily talk to an unlabelled NPC to proceed.

I still believe that Legend of Kay Anniversary could’ve charmed me. There is some appeal, even if it is just a drip-feed of pure novelty, in playing an old-fashioned action-adventure that’s a little bit more focussed; a little bit more on-rails in a way that isn’t just a linear sequence of scripted events. Unfortunate, then, that the base game itself is so utterly unremarkable. It’s the kind of game you might’ve found resting in the top of an EB Games bargain bin in 2006; the kind of game that would’ve been bought for you by a well-meaning but relatively clueless relative for your thirteenth birthday. Fast-forward to 2015, and it’s no surprise that a lick of fresh paint isn’t enough to prop it up any more. There’s nothing it does that hasn’t been surpassed countless times by now, and while the same could probably be said of a lot of pioneering titles of the same era, this isn’t one of them. The Legend of Kay, I’m afraid, isn’t a legend so much as a footnote.