Kid Chameleon is often featured on lists of noteworthy games for the Sega Genesis. Personally I had never heard of the title back in the 90s. Sonic the Hedgehog basically overshadowed all vaguely similar games on the platform back then anyway. With all of the critical acclaim throughout the years I was expecting something really special. Unfortunately Kid Chameleon is one of the most boring and uninspired platformers of the era. It’s a common trend for Sega’s early first party releases to be overrated, but this one is on a whole new level. Kid Chameleon is a boring snoozefest that reminds me of something like Keith Courage on the TurboGrafx-16.
If there’s one thing Kid Chameleon has going for it then it’s that intro. It’s full of 90s attitude and colorful graphics. The story here is that there’s a popular arcade with a new virtual reality machine called the Wild Side. It’s a big hit with the local kids until one day that AI inside goes rogue and begins keeping captive the children that lose. Kid Chameleon happens to be the baddest dude around, and the only one tough enough to rescue all the captured kids from their digital prison. Let’s begin with how lame the character himself is. He’s a greaser style punk with sunglasses. It’s not exactly inspired level design. The developers put more effort into designing him because the enemies tend to be generic animals and the like.
Kid Chameleon has a few interesting elements to it, but the basic gameplay is pretty generic. You guide the titular character from one end of the level to the next. Rinse, lather, and repeat. There are boss characters to mix up the action but by and large this is the basic formula. Kid Chameleon can walk, slide, and jump. The basic idea is that you’ve got to jump on enemy’s heads to defeat them (ala Mario) and you have a life bar of just three notches. When these are depleted it’s a game over. There is no option to save your progress nor is there a password system. Kid Chameleon is actually very long so this is completely unacceptable. It’s not like it came out on the NES; this was a 16-bit Sega Genesis title in the 90s.
This brings me to the stage themes. You can tell right away that the developers didn’t care at all for this game because the beginning of the game throws levels like the forest, grassy hill, and mountain your way. With the idea of the virtual world behind the story they literally had a gold mine of ideas they could have run with. These generic themes were the best they could do? Forget about it. In this sense Kid Chameleon actually seems like something you’d play in Europe on PC’s in the early 90s. This is not a compliment, rather, I’m highlighting the amount of jank in its design. The enemies are also highly generic. You’ve got your basic animals and uninspired blob things that you can’t quite tell what they are. It’s pretty clear most of Kid Chameleon was simply phoned in.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that Kid Chameleon does actually have a pretty neat power-up system. It’s not that any of these are particularly great, rather, there are a whole lot of them. These come in the form of transformations, or helmets he can put on that grant him different abilities. Kid Chameleon can become a knight, samurai, adorn a hockey mask and throw axes, shrink down to the size of a bug, and more. Many of these aren’t strictly offensive and instead are required in order to destroy obstacles in some of the stages. The power-ups are generally a little on the boring side. I like the ability to attack in new ways those that use melee attacks suffer from some weird collision detection. What’s nice is that by collecting diamonds you can use super moves with their power-ups.
Perhaps the most painful issue in Kid Chameleon though is the level designs. It’s all different shades of repetition from start to finish with a few very uninspired new obstacles thrown your way. Seriously, why does every level need to consist almost entirely of hills? It slows down gameplay, and just isn’t very fun to traverse. The other areas are just as uninspired. Some of the stage specific obstacles had some thought put into them, but the execution is always flawed and painfully boring. The fact that it’s this bad isn’t even reliant on the cookie cutter nature of this title. Kid Chameleon is awful because it’s good parts are ruined by mind boggling bad design choices. It’s not unplayable, but that doesn’t matter when there’s literally hundreds of games that came out that same year that are worlds better.
And now we get to the graphics. Remember how I said in some ways this reminds me of a PAL region PC game from the early 90s? Well the visuals are a big part of this. The character designs are downright awful and overly goofy. With Kid Chameleon they were going for a ‘cool’ protagonist, but in this case we just got someone who looks like they got stung in the face by a bee. The backgrounds lack any kind of outline which makes them look like they were designed in Microsoft Paint. Kid Chameleon is seriously one ugly game. The soundtrack fares even worse. It takes all of the weaknesses of the Sega Genesis sound chip and compounds them several times over. The music consists entirely of robot farts and screeching noises. There’s no reason the soundtrack should have gotten past the planning stages sounding this bad.
