Action-adventure game released in 2000 by Tate Interactive. During development it was known as Denis the Kangaroo.
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This review contains spoilers
All-time classic from my youth.
When my mom brought “Kao the Kangaroo” home, boxed and all, I did not know what to expect. My little child brain was filled with joy when I first booted it up. It is, and always will be, a classic game that defined my youth, and even today, I still find it fun to play.
In the core, Kao the Kangaroo is a Sonic and Crash Bandicoot rip off that wanted to start a new franchise. You are a cute, little, yellow kangaroo with red boxing gloves and a high-pitched voice. The story is cliché but child friendly. A hunter stole your little Kangaroo buddies, and you need to rescue them. You venture trough different levels and, in the end, fight the hunter and kick his ass.
This is already the first major plus of this game; the levels and their design. There is so much variety and different themes, it is really impressive for a game like this. You first start in the jungle, go to the south-pole, infiltrate a boat, go to ancient Rome, ride a speedboat, go to space, and finally to a tropical island. No level is the same or looks alike and it is just good fun to play them.
The graphics are jolly and colorful. For its time, I still think it looks fine, even today. The animations are nice and run smoothly. There is no clipping or falling trough platforms or anything like that, so overall, I think it is really well done.
There are some boss stages and vehicle stages to complete that are so much fun. The bosses are stupidly easy, but well thought off. The snowboarding, jet ski and crocodile drive levels are the most fun I had with the game.
There is a problem with this game, however. It is a platformer and the only thing that does not work that great, are the controls. The controls are horrendous and stiff and turning, jumping and hitting enemies is all so slow and stiff, it is unplayable at times. Especially the combat. You just wiggle your boxing gloves forwards and hope for the best. There is no indication that you are about to hit first, instead of the enemy. This can be frustrating at times.
What sets Kao the Kangaroo apart for me, is the excellent music. Every stage has its own unique track and they all sound just glorious. It has no right to be this good. I cannot really explain why I liked it so much but this game, along with two other games, are the only ones in which I downloaded the complete track lists and still play them in the background when working or gaming sometimes. It is crazy good and that is all I have to say about it.
The game did not age that well in modern society, especially with the Political Correctness climate we live in now. Play the Maze and Tropical levels of this game, and you will see that the native inhabitants are all very stereotypical. If I were to publish screenshots from this game today, of those levels, I would be burned at the stake.
In the end, Kao the Kangaroo is a surprisingly good game that faded into obscurity. For me however, it is one of the most fun games I have played in my youth, and I will always hold it dear.
When my mom brought “Kao the Kangaroo” home, boxed and all, I did not know what to expect. My little child brain was filled with joy when I first booted it up. It is, and always will be, a classic game that defined my youth, and even today, I still find it fun to play.
In the core, Kao the Kangaroo is a Sonic and Crash Bandicoot rip off that wanted to start a new franchise. You are a cute, little, yellow kangaroo with red boxing gloves and a high-pitched voice. The story is cliché but child friendly. A hunter stole your little Kangaroo buddies, and you need to rescue them. You venture trough different levels and, in the end, fight the hunter and kick his ass.
This is already the first major plus of this game; the levels and their design. There is so much variety and different themes, it is really impressive for a game like this. You first start in the jungle, go to the south-pole, infiltrate a boat, go to ancient Rome, ride a speedboat, go to space, and finally to a tropical island. No level is the same or looks alike and it is just good fun to play them.
The graphics are jolly and colorful. For its time, I still think it looks fine, even today. The animations are nice and run smoothly. There is no clipping or falling trough platforms or anything like that, so overall, I think it is really well done.
There are some boss stages and vehicle stages to complete that are so much fun. The bosses are stupidly easy, but well thought off. The snowboarding, jet ski and crocodile drive levels are the most fun I had with the game.
There is a problem with this game, however. It is a platformer and the only thing that does not work that great, are the controls. The controls are horrendous and stiff and turning, jumping and hitting enemies is all so slow and stiff, it is unplayable at times. Especially the combat. You just wiggle your boxing gloves forwards and hope for the best. There is no indication that you are about to hit first, instead of the enemy. This can be frustrating at times.
What sets Kao the Kangaroo apart for me, is the excellent music. Every stage has its own unique track and they all sound just glorious. It has no right to be this good. I cannot really explain why I liked it so much but this game, along with two other games, are the only ones in which I downloaded the complete track lists and still play them in the background when working or gaming sometimes. It is crazy good and that is all I have to say about it.
The game did not age that well in modern society, especially with the Political Correctness climate we live in now. Play the Maze and Tropical levels of this game, and you will see that the native inhabitants are all very stereotypical. If I were to publish screenshots from this game today, of those levels, I would be burned at the stake.
In the end, Kao the Kangaroo is a surprisingly good game that faded into obscurity. For me however, it is one of the most fun games I have played in my youth, and I will always hold it dear.
A poor man's Crash Bandicoot
I agree with many other reviews that for a platformer, there is not a lot of skill expression or anything that is truly engaging beside the flying, surfing and other levels where its not really about platforming. It does not have the story or the movement to make it memorable or engaging. It truly does not hold up well in modern standards like Mario 64 which the game is trying to emulate. However it gets 2.5 stars because I can not truly hate Kao because he looks too cute for me to hate him.
really bad first impression, but once you get used to it and into the swing of things it's a below average standard ass 3d platformer. like, not great still don't get me wrong! controls are not amazing, it's very slow, level design isn't particularly special or notable. the only big highlights are the snowboarding/surfing/sliding sections, those are pretty fun. even still it's an incredibly mediocre 3d platformer that is buggy as hell and barely functions on steam. it's also like less than a $1 after i bought the collection of all 3 originals so idk i'm not that angry. something i'll forget every detail about aside from kao being a pretty adorable lil guy.
Gotta admit, I sympathise with the enemies here. I want to kill this fucking kangaroo too.
Kao the Kangaroo, a 3D mascot platformer in the sea of many, just as the mascot platformer boom of the nineties was on the path to dying down. But this one was different...it was from Poland! This, of course, was before the likes of CD Projekt catapulted the country towards becoming the 4th largest export of video games in the world - humble Kao over here isn't any more impressive than the likes of Crash Bandicoot, leaving his adventure feeling pretty outdated from the start.
Despite what the title implies, Kao himself resembles a bipedal yellow rat moreso than a kangaroo, and his running speed is utterly woeful. There's a whole power-up dedicated to letting him actually hop like a kangaroo, but only for about 5 seconds, for each of the five times you'll probably come across it across the 30-or-so levels.
The controls are easily the worst part - alongside his slow running speed, Kao also turns pretty awkwardly. There's no native controller support, and the hackneyed-together Steam config gives him a clumsy turning circle that makes all the hurried precision platforming very difficult. Most jumps, even early on, demand Kao be at the absolute edge before jumping across. The camera also doesn't do much to help with this either, but I've seen far worse in 3D platformers of both this era and beyond, so props for that.
Enemies are pretty goofy and don't really do anything special beyond sprinting directly towards Kao when in range. Fortunately at your disposal is a punch attack, with a short range and embarrassingly poor collision detection, as well as a tail swipe with a slightly longer range and embarrassingly poor collision detection. Most enemies will likely hit you before your attacks connect with them, unless you try for a sneaky jump attack. To help mitigate this, you can collect boxing glove projectiles, but they're consumable and scattered around levels in a limited capacity.
Speaking of consumables, one challenging aspect I actually really appreciated is how your lives and checkpoints are handled. You can save in the menu after each level, while on the level select screen (you'd better keep that in mind because the game sure doesn't imply it), and you get extra lives for every 50 coins collected. Running out of lives kicks you back to the main menu, and if you haven't been saving, that's all your progress lost. As for checkpoints, they're also found in the stage like the boxing gloves, and - this is the fun part - you can put them down wherever you'd like. Next segment looking too scary? Throw a checkpoint down. It's shockingly tactical for an otherwise unassuming 3D platformer, and I'm wondering if it might be inspired from any other games at the time? If not, hats off to Tate Multimedia.
Levels themselves are plenty in number, and unfortunately unmemorable. Themes shift seemingly at random from stage to stage, often repeating, and don't have much going on beyond the tricky jumps, stock enemies, and bonus levels. The low points would have to be the vehicle stages, though - which see Kao zoom forwards uncontrollably where the slightest brush with the wall means instant death (and no, no checkpoints allowed). That, and the bosses. Everyone wants to stop Kao from rescuing his family from The Hunter. A bear, a pirate, even aliens and fucking ZEUS HIMSELF show up to kill that rat. Doing damage to the bosses range from embarrassingly obvious to mind-blowingly obscure, and I can't help but wonder if children even knew how to do this back in the day? I'm 22 and I had to look up a guide on how the Zeus fight even works!
Music is, well, nostalgic. In that way that cheap, bargain bin stock PC game music hits different. It's low-quality to an almost ethereal level, the compositions leaving my head almost immediately after they cease but leaving that dream-like aftertaste. I can't really rag on it though, because then I feel like I'd be punching down on it.
And that's the crux of the issue when it comes to reviewing Kao the bloody Kangaroo, really. It's a low budget game, made in Poland, which I don't recall having the strongest games industry circa. 2000, and despite how outdated it is in the grand scheme of things, these guys made a functional game with no shortage of actual content, repetitive though it may be. I didn't really enjoy my time with it, but I think this is a perfectly inoffensive little platformer that I could only ever recommend to the hardcore enthusiasts of the genre.
As a bonus, there was an entirely separate game made for the Game Boy Advance, and as it doesn't have its own page, I'll leave a quick review here. A-hem:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGHH.
Thank you.
Kao the Kangaroo, a 3D mascot platformer in the sea of many, just as the mascot platformer boom of the nineties was on the path to dying down. But this one was different...it was from Poland! This, of course, was before the likes of CD Projekt catapulted the country towards becoming the 4th largest export of video games in the world - humble Kao over here isn't any more impressive than the likes of Crash Bandicoot, leaving his adventure feeling pretty outdated from the start.
Despite what the title implies, Kao himself resembles a bipedal yellow rat moreso than a kangaroo, and his running speed is utterly woeful. There's a whole power-up dedicated to letting him actually hop like a kangaroo, but only for about 5 seconds, for each of the five times you'll probably come across it across the 30-or-so levels.
The controls are easily the worst part - alongside his slow running speed, Kao also turns pretty awkwardly. There's no native controller support, and the hackneyed-together Steam config gives him a clumsy turning circle that makes all the hurried precision platforming very difficult. Most jumps, even early on, demand Kao be at the absolute edge before jumping across. The camera also doesn't do much to help with this either, but I've seen far worse in 3D platformers of both this era and beyond, so props for that.
Enemies are pretty goofy and don't really do anything special beyond sprinting directly towards Kao when in range. Fortunately at your disposal is a punch attack, with a short range and embarrassingly poor collision detection, as well as a tail swipe with a slightly longer range and embarrassingly poor collision detection. Most enemies will likely hit you before your attacks connect with them, unless you try for a sneaky jump attack. To help mitigate this, you can collect boxing glove projectiles, but they're consumable and scattered around levels in a limited capacity.
Speaking of consumables, one challenging aspect I actually really appreciated is how your lives and checkpoints are handled. You can save in the menu after each level, while on the level select screen (you'd better keep that in mind because the game sure doesn't imply it), and you get extra lives for every 50 coins collected. Running out of lives kicks you back to the main menu, and if you haven't been saving, that's all your progress lost. As for checkpoints, they're also found in the stage like the boxing gloves, and - this is the fun part - you can put them down wherever you'd like. Next segment looking too scary? Throw a checkpoint down. It's shockingly tactical for an otherwise unassuming 3D platformer, and I'm wondering if it might be inspired from any other games at the time? If not, hats off to Tate Multimedia.
Levels themselves are plenty in number, and unfortunately unmemorable. Themes shift seemingly at random from stage to stage, often repeating, and don't have much going on beyond the tricky jumps, stock enemies, and bonus levels. The low points would have to be the vehicle stages, though - which see Kao zoom forwards uncontrollably where the slightest brush with the wall means instant death (and no, no checkpoints allowed). That, and the bosses. Everyone wants to stop Kao from rescuing his family from The Hunter. A bear, a pirate, even aliens and fucking ZEUS HIMSELF show up to kill that rat. Doing damage to the bosses range from embarrassingly obvious to mind-blowingly obscure, and I can't help but wonder if children even knew how to do this back in the day? I'm 22 and I had to look up a guide on how the Zeus fight even works!
Music is, well, nostalgic. In that way that cheap, bargain bin stock PC game music hits different. It's low-quality to an almost ethereal level, the compositions leaving my head almost immediately after they cease but leaving that dream-like aftertaste. I can't really rag on it though, because then I feel like I'd be punching down on it.
And that's the crux of the issue when it comes to reviewing Kao the bloody Kangaroo, really. It's a low budget game, made in Poland, which I don't recall having the strongest games industry circa. 2000, and despite how outdated it is in the grand scheme of things, these guys made a functional game with no shortage of actual content, repetitive though it may be. I didn't really enjoy my time with it, but I think this is a perfectly inoffensive little platformer that I could only ever recommend to the hardcore enthusiasts of the genre.
As a bonus, there was an entirely separate game made for the Game Boy Advance, and as it doesn't have its own page, I'll leave a quick review here. A-hem:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGHH.
Thank you.
kinda funny