Yo-Ho Kablammo comes to us courtesy of Canalside Studios who are an off-shoot of the University of Huddersfield’s game development degree courses. Those sorts of breeding grounds have offered some real treats over the years as new creative talent has stretched its legs in pursuit of working on the big franchises at the big studios. It’s an impressive feat then for Canalside Studios to have one of its projects offered core Marketplace exposure. It’s a shame that the spotlight couldn’t have been placed elsewhere.
The game concept essentially boils down to an arena based pirate combat game where you take command of a seaworthy vessel and are charged with the destruction of foes in a similar situation. Simple controls allow you absolute movement of your boat around the choppy seas. The left and right triggers control your port and starboard cannons which are your primary weapons against your foes whether they be AI controlled or Xbox Live competitors. Power ups are dropped down from the skies that grant extra power to your shells or the ability to perform an extra fast ram straight through other ships.
Power ups aren’t going to be what wins you matches though and your reliance on cannons is almost absolute. Typically you’ll be forced to wait around 10 seconds for them to reload. If accuracy was possible then this wouldn’t be a huge problem but unfortunately you’ll struggle to position your craft properly. The left stick controls your direction relative to its position – in other words you don’t turn your boat but instead point it the way you want to go. That makes pulling alongside people extremely difficult. Firing your canon, only to flick yourself out of position highlights the weak control scheme and the painful restrictions put on your fun by the epic waits.
If the game can’t be about all out carnage then perhaps it can be about strategy and guile instead. Again disappointment sets in as the various arenas fail to offer variety let along tactical opportunities. With frustration properly set in the cover created by small jutting rocks really only gets in the way of your desperate attempts. Their varying size has the greatest effect on gameplay and there is the potential for great to-and-fro battles where the range of your weapons becomes the limiting factor.
I have to stress the importance of the world ‘potential’ as you may well struggle to explore different styles of play. The game is clearly designed with multiplayer in mind and supports local and Xbox Live options. You’ll need to get some friends round if you want to really get stuck in as the Live lobbies are, at all times that I tried, entirely empty. It seems that the cute pirates concept hasn’t grabbed many with any gamer tempted to spend their points on the game being greeted by the realisation that they may well have been the only one.
A single-player challenge mode attempts to get things back on track and uses the different multiplayer modes to do it. AI bots fill the levels and you are charged with a single task but unfortunately Canalside Studios falls into a common trap of junior developers. The AI is ruthlessly efficient in most cases and your only real chance at overcoming it is to find a weak spot in the programming. An example would be that in the larger levels you can hide in a corner and let the bots kill each other. If that sounds like an old-fashioned problem then you’d be about right – more experienced developers can balance their game.
I can’t recommend Yo-Ho to anybody other than to the select few people looking for a simple party title to introduce something different to the usual multiplayer fodder. It status as a second place winner the the Dream.Build.Play certainly suggests that there is enjoyment to be had if you have a number of people interested in playing at once. Unfortunately the lack of interest in the game means that the games frustrating construction can’t be overcome through the powers of friends and decent presentation may as well be forgotten.
VideogameUK verdict: 2/10
