Kao The Kangaroo Review - GamersHell.com

Kao? Croc...! Looks like Titus found Croc was pretty funny and choosed to do some cut and paste and to put some enhancements aswell. Really, overall if you know Croc there's not much more to acquire from these lines, look at screenshoots and go buy it, skip on it just if you didn't like something with Croc.

Kao falls (again) into 3D Platform genre, games with some adventure plot, few puzzles but aiming at jumping coordination and timing mostly. Often going by trials is a must, that's especially true with KAO, indeed a good trainer will not ruin the game anyhow. Kao falls into higher group of 3D Adventures, those that were done with some more accuracy, keeping in mind someone is going to play them, not just to look or review (!).

Kao features a nice and friendly character, even if being a kangoroo it should really exploit higher jumps... it looks like he's a chicken trying to fly. The game is impressively long and altough some levels are completed in 10 minutes, you will not find you have beaten it in 8 hours like with Donald Duck. Levels are really well thought and pretty different from each other, different actions and various arcade areas will be fronted, still gameplay is completely linear, you will have to end all the levels, one by one being denied on next one till current one is correctly completed. Further more each level has no short cut or different plots, just playing it all over from begin to the end. That's a trouble that arised with original Croc too, and like Croc 1, with Koo you will have huge troubles in various points of the game.

Kao did in some way enhance the saving game idea with dinamic checkpoints represented by flags. You will be able to use them anywhere and if you die you will restart from there. Though there are no infite flags, instead you will often you're missing a bunch of them and having to play some titbits of a level a lot of times just to reach the hard point where you keep dying. Anyway, everything considered, this flag thingie is a good idea, killing out the mass saving of games like doom, though it can't avoid the frustration of repeating some areas way too many times. Another trouble with Kao is the controlling system... indeed it's like Croc and not in the Mario's clones crowd, left and right keys will turn you, not move, only up and down keys (same applies with gamepad) will actually move Kao. Even if gathering more precision this controlling system makes jumping sections harder and frustating, using an analog controller or keyboard is a must, classic digital gamepad is completely an unhortodox sytem control with Kao.

Textures are really rich and detailed, though characters are not defined well enough, sometimes the game looks like a shareware coded games whilst sometimes you will encounter gorgeous looking areas, really graphics with Kao are hard to judge. The camera system is pretty well thought just overall covering a wider area than needed leaving on screen a really small character, thought it doesn't in whatsover way ruin the gaming experience.

Oh, well, Kao is a nice game, it's hard and doesn't feel like a masterpiece, though it has some goodies of RayMan 2 (the variety of areas: flying sections and various others), the complexity of levels of Croc, well, though, it is not anything special. Good but not gorgeous, I could not explain to myself what's really wrong with it, and I hardly could stop playing it, though I can easily feel I was not in front of RayMan 2.

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