Leedmees is a small Kinect game from Konami, and it's one in a growing line of Kinect titles you need to play. It's a unique, 1:1 motion control puzzle game that has you helping a bunch of small creatures from one point to another by carrying and guiding them around with your body.

It might sound like Lemmings for Kinect, but Leedmees is so much more. The presentation is your first clue to this - while there's little story here, Leedmees has a fantastic art style that mixes several different inspirations to create a look that works well to create both light and dark moods. The leedmees themselves are cute little creatures that fit well into the style of the game, and are easily distinguished from your character and other elements. You, meanwhile, play a person turned into a sort of stick figure (though nonetheless a stylized one). The soundtrack is decent, though perhaps a little repetitive towards the end.

The goal is to lead the leedmees towards the end point of each level. In order to pass a stage, and unlock more stages, you need a certain amount of leedmees to reach said goal. Your performance is graded - which positions you on leaderboards - and in order to get the top grade you need to collect stars scattered around each stage. It's a pretty simple premise, but the developers at Konami have made great use of it. The leedmees can walk across your body, so you'll be leading them across many different obstacles and through many different challenges. It takes a few stages before the game starts to get going, but once it does, it introduces new ideas and gameplay concepts quite often, most of which are very enjoyable to play through.

Most of the levels are characterized by chaotic fun. The feeling you get from carrying around a bunch of small creatures on your arms while you're trying to clear a bunch of obstacles is rare in gaming. This is mostly because you're put inside the game in a way few games have thus far attempted, let alone managed to achieve successfully. Getting your leedmees safely to their goal becomes something you actually start to care about, because the experience is so involving, and not just because the game tells you to do it.

Later levels can be a bit frustrating, though. Some are simply challenging, but others will see your character's right and left sides switched, which makes it hard to play well. Aside from a handful of frustrating levels late in the game, there's only one other major flaw, and that's Konami's Kinect implementation; your leedmees are quite fragile (easily killed or sent flying off the stage) and, from time to time, the game will misinterpret what you're doing and send your character into a quick spasm that has leedmees dying left and right. On most stages it doesn't matter - unless you're trying to go for a perfect playthrough - but it's really annoying in the final few levels. If you're trying to achieve a perfect grade in a stage then prepare to be frustrated.

But back to the positive. Leedmees also has a two player multiplayer mode. It's local only and consists of 12 stages, but you won't find any of the stages terribly frustrating and it's actually pretty great fun. Unfortunately, it feels more like a teaser of what could have been, as you can go through it in about an hour or so. It's worth coming back to occasionally, simply because it's fun, but otherwise it lacks replay value. The Kinect implementation also has the same problems here as it does in the single player stages, though it only really becomes noticeable if you're going for perfect scores.

At the end of the day, despite the criticisms above, Leedmees is a lot of fun, and at 800 points for 5-7 hours of playtime I can recommend it to just about any Kinect owner out there looking for a unique and fun Kinect game.