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humble Kao over here isn't any more impressive than the likes of Crash Bandicoot, leaving his adventure feeling pretty outdated from the start.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.