Kao the Kangaroo Review: A Blast from Platformers Past

If you grew up in the late 90’s and early 2000’s like me, you probably remember the gluttony of mascot platformers that were being released during this time. You know those platform games that usually had a very marketable main character, usually a kind of animal, those kinds of games.

I remember seeing a lot of these on game shelves during the fifth and sixth generations. Everyone and their grandmother were trying to create the next Sonic and Crash. And while you had your A-list platformers like Ratchet and Clank or Sly Cooper, for every one of those there were usually 5 or 6 more B-listers aligning store shelves.

I’ve heard other names for them like AA or middle market titles, but I always called them B-listers. And I don’t mean that as a pejorative. Truth be told the only thing that prevented a lot of B-list platformers from getting on the A-list was budget. They simply didn’t have the same money behind them that the major players did.

While a lot of B-list platformers weren’t anything special, some of them were pretty good. If you look through some of the lesser-known mascot platformers you can find a lot of hidden gems that still have a cult following today.

Which brings us to the topic of the day, Kao the Kangaroo. Starting as an early Dreamcast title, Kao the Kangaroo was developed by Tate Multimedia, a small gaming company in Poland. it was essentially a Crash Bandicoot clone with that same kind of hallway like level design. It wasn’t as good as Crash, but it had some unique ideas of its own like being able to set your own checkpoints.

Kao the Kangaroo Round 2 is the Kao game most people remember. I myself have memories of playing the PSP port as a kid and I thought it was alright. Nothing ground-breaking, but a solid enough little platformer. It managed to differentiate more from Crash by making the levels more open, and by copying a lot from Rayman 2.

Sadly, after the third game, which was exclusive to PCs and never released outside of Poland. After that Kao would share the same fate as many a mascot and sink into obscurity. Until now. In a move that I’m sure has nothing to do with the resurgence of an orange marsupial, Kao is back with a brand-new game for all modern platforms.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this. If fucking Bubsy can make a comeback anyone can. Still, it’s always nice to see forgotten mascots be given a second chance in the spotlight. But is this a welcome return, or an example of a character that should have remained dead.

The story of Kao the Kangaroo is that Kao’s dad and sister go missing and he sets out to rescue them. That’s basically it. It’s a 3D platformer so the story isn’t a big focus of the game, but even with those low standards Kao the Kangaroo comes up short.

The writing tries to lean more towards comedy and very little of it works. Some of the jokes do land, but a lot of them, including the pop culture references, fall flat on their face. The dialogue is generic, and the characters are forgettable.

I think all of this would be better to swallow if the main character was a lot more fun. Kao is cute and all, but they don’t do a whole with his personality. He’s the typical spunky young upstart who loves adventure, which is fine, and the character is likable enough, he’s just not that memorable.

I will give them this, they did at least try to give Kao a coherent world and supporting cast. That was something the previous games lacked somewhat, and though they didn’t fully succeed, there are some aspects of the story I like.

One major new element introduced in the game are that Kao’s boxing gloves are living entities that are actually evil. That’s a cool idea, reminds me of Splatterhouse only without the eldritch horror and constant swearing. I only wish they did more with it. The gloves being evil doesn’t become a factor until the endgame and they don’t say much to Kao aside from exposition. It’s a waste of a cool idea.

It doesn’t help that the voice acting is not very good. Granted a lot of the voice actors are Polish, meaning that English likely isn’t their first language. So, I’ll cut them some slack here, but the acting overall is pretty flat. It’s not even so bad its good voice acting like in Legend of Kay, it’s just boring.

The cutscenes also aren’t the best. The animations are stiff and there’s not a whole lot of action in any of them. You can really see the low budget of the game when it comes to the cutscenes.

That said I think the game looks good during gameplay. It has a similar stylised cartoony art-style that the Spyro Reignited trilogy had though obviously not quite on the same level. The levels are bright and colourful and there’s a decent amount of visual variety in the locations.

Even the animations are better in gameplay. It’s very bouncy and cartoony which is perfect for a platformer like this. The character designs look cute enough and I like Kao’s new design a lot. You can tell a lot of love went into the visuals and the designers clearly did the best with the limited budget they had.

It also runs at a stable frame rate. I never noticed any dips when playing the Xbox version, though I don’t know how the other versions fare. That isn’t to say the game doesn’t have technical problems, but I’ll get to that later.

As for how the game plays, well it’s a typical 3D platforming. You run, jump, fight enemies and search for collectables. It follows the typical platformer formula down to the letter, almost to a fault. The game never does anything new; it plays things a little too safe to the point of feeling derivative.

But you know what, I don’t it cares whether it’s derivative. Kao the Kangaroo is very clearly a throwback to 3D platformers from the sixth console generation. It’s not trying to reinvent the genre, its content being a simple pick and play platformer. And you know what, it succeeds at that.

The level design is solid with a decent amount of variety. The levels are linear like in Crash Bandicoot but a little bit more open so you can explore and find secrets. It sits in this weird middle ground between the openness of Spyro and the linearity of Crash and it works surprisingly well. There are enough secret areas to make exploration rewarding and levels aren’t too long, which makes backtracking through them to get anything you missed a breeze.

Kao himself controls decently enough. The jumping feels ok, it’s not the best I’ve seen but his jumps have the right amount of weight and it still felt satisfying jumping on platforms.

Kao’s move set is a little more rigid than some other platforming mascots. He’s got a decent number of moves but there’s no way to use them in interesting ways. It’s not like in Mario where you have a ton of moves that let you break the game in half, it’s a tighter more focused move set that works for what the game offers.

Unlike Mario, or Crash for that matter, Kao has a bigger focus on combat. Kao has a standard 3-hit combo that’s useful for taking out most enemies, but he also has a roll that lets him damage enemies or dodge attacks. He even has a meter that fills up as you attack and when it’s full, he gains a speed boost and access to a powerful finishing move that can hit multiple enemies at once.

For all the emphasis on combat though it is very basic. There’s not a lot of combo moves, and most battles can be won by just mashing the attack button. It’s still satisfying to beat up on enemies though, and the enemy variety is surprisingly decent, so I never got bored with the combat despite how brainless it can be.

A lot of the stuff Kao can do will feel very familiar to fans of the series. Anything he can do in the original games he can do here, except for gliding that got removed. You never really need it for anything, but I do miss it a little bit. Gliding’s always a fun mechanic, you know except when Bubsy does it.

One other change is how boomerangs work. Before you picked up a bunch and could use them in combat. Here you can only pick up one at a time from tiki-heads and they’re mainly used for puzzle solving. You can hit enemies with them, or use them to drop things on enemies, but this isn’t ideal and pretty situational. I’m not a fan of the boomerangs personally, they aren’t very satisfying to use.

Kao does have some new tools at his disposal. The first is a grappling hook which you can use to swing from hooks, and the elemental pick-ups which give the boxing gloves elemental properties to solve environmental puzzles.

The grappling hook is a lot of fun. It’s not the smoothest I’ve seen, but it gets the job done. Once you get the hang of the physics you can get some great distance with these and the sections where you use it are some of the more exhilarating in the game.

I don’t know if I like how the elemental powers are handled though. While you mainly use them for environmental puzzles, you can use them in combat as it changes the properties of your finishing moves. And you can pick up extra charges to hold onto the elemental properties for longer. Making it less situational than the boomerang.

My problem with it is, why even have the charges at all? Why not just give me the elemental properties as permanent upgrades? Yeah, it would remove some of the challenge from the puzzles, but if that’s the case, redesign the puzzles. It’s not like they’re all that difficult anyway, just feels like padding making me have to keep picking these up.

The game is not very hard, in fact it’s really easy. Nothing here provides much of a challenge and the game gives you plenty of lives to get through the game. Personally, I think they shouldn’t have had them to begin with since they’re an antiquated concept but that’s just me.

This is especially true for the bosses. The bosses themselves do have interesting patterns, but they are not hard to figure out at all. The game is a cakewalk, even newbies should be able to get through the game with little effort. I get the game is meant for young kids, but so was Spyro and that still had its challenging moments.

Like any 3D platformer you’ll find collectables scattered throughout the levels. You can find coins, crystals and letters in each level. The letters will unlock new costumes, the coins let you buy upgrades and costumes, and the crystals… I don’t know what they do. They don’t seem to do anything other than contribute to your completion percentage. Kind of feel like a waste.

The alternate costumes are a neat addition. I especially love the retro costume that gives Kao his classic design, I love that stuff. A few of the other outfits are also references to previous Kao games which should be a good nostalgia trip for fans of the series.

The only other collectibles are the heart pieces and the runes. The heart pieces will give you an additional heart when you get 4, and the runes are used to unlock levels. The runes act similar to the crystals from Crash, and much like those they are impossible to miss. You’ll get them out in the open and it’s just a matter of picking them up.

Like in other 3D platformers, you don’t need all the runes to beat the game, though it might as well. You can only miss 2 runes if you want to get to the final level and given how easy these are to get I wonder why they even bothered having the extra 2 runes in the first place is beyond me. Just have me collect all the runes to beat the game, it’s no big deal.

You ca also find secret challenge rooms that contain extra coins and gems. These were ok though they did come off as filler. You could remove these and not lose a whole lot. They aren’t even challenging, so the name just comes across as false advertising.

Kao the Kangaroo is not one of the greatest platformers of all time, far from it. it’s very basic, way too easy and doesn’t do a whole lot new. But you know what, I still had a great time with it. The game may not have the greatest gameplay, but it’s done competently well, and it has so much charm it’s hard not to love.

A lot of it is down to the level design. There’s a lot of great little details that make the levels fun to explore. Like one of the levels takes place in a juice factory built in the jungle and you explore it by travelling on massive rivers of juice. That’s the kind of creative premise I look for in a platformer.

You can tell the developers are massive fans of classic era 3D platformers. A lot of the typical level tropes and ideas you saw in those early games are here, and while it can be seen as derivative, you could also see it as paying reverence to those classics.

If you’re a fan of PS2 era platformers this is perfect for you, because it feels like a love letter to those games. This isn’t a cash grab designed to cash in on the resurgence of Crash. You can tell the people behind it but a lot of care into it.

But, and this is a big but, none of that can distract from how unpolished this game is. Now before I get into this, I need to reiterate that this is not a big budget game. I don’t expect it to have the same amount of polish as a AAA game, hell there are some AAA games that are buggy as shit, look at Battlefield for example.

That said it would be disingenuous for me not to criticize a game for technical issues no matter it’s budget. And Kao the Kangaroo has a lot of technical issues. There were sound mixing issues, some cutscenes didn’t have sound effects, there was collision detection issues on some of the objects, one of the levels randomly ended early before I picked up the final rune and I was forced to replay it all over again.

One of the more confusing technical issues is with the crystals. Whenever you die, or fall in a pit, and restart at the checkpoint, any crystals you picked up respawn in the level and you need to pick them up again. This is the only collectable that does this and I don’t know why.

But here’s the weird thing, the crystals in the level respawn, but your total amount of crystals stays the same. So, if you respawn at a checkpoint and pick the crystals up that also respawn, you’ll have an excess amount of them. It’s kind of funny in a way, but as someone who must get everything in a platformer, it sent my platformer OCD into overdrive.

Those are just some of the technical issues It’s a shame the game is this unpolished because the game is solid. I know most of these can be patched out and I hope they do because they do distract from how fun the game is.

Kao the Kangaroo does an admirable job at being a throwback to the classic era of 3D platformers. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table and some of its ideas could be expanded on and improved, but what’s here is still decent.

That said, unless you’re a huge fan of 3D platformers I don’t think I can fully recommend it. It’s good, but there are better 3D platformers that offer more creative ideas and robust experiences that I would recommend before this one.

But if you are a fan of 3D platformers from the PS2 generation and you want something new to play that scratches that itch, this isn’t a bad one to check out. And with how easy the game is I would also recommend it to younger players looking to get into the genre. It’s also not too expensive. It’s only £25 which is a fair price for what you’re getting.

I’m just glad to see the game is good. Unlike the Bubsy revival, which was done because memes, this one feels like a genuine attempt to bring back a forgotten mascot and breathe new life into him. it was made because the developers wanted to make it, and in today’s overly corporate gaming culture that’s something I deeply appreciate.

Plus, if Kao can come back imagine who else can. Could Gex see a return? How about Banjo & Kazooie? Hell let’s get super crazy and bring back Bug. The sky’s the limit at this point. Maybe we leave Bubsy behind though. Some mascots deserve to die.