Kao the Kangaroo Review

The idiom imitation is the sincerest form of flattery fits as snugly as Kao’s boxing gloves. If you’re familiar with the Kao The Kangaroo games you know where all its inspirations come from. A kangaroo with boxing gloves you say, where has that been done before? Oh yes Roger from the TEKKEN series. A marsupial with a furry orange complexion who wears blue jeans? Wow, look at that it’s Crash Bandicoot! A platforming game with open environments you can jaunt around in at your leisure collecting magubbins? Now you got yourself a Spyro, Jak & Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Banjo Kazooie, and many familiar platforming games you may know about from the early noughties. 

It’s true, this new platformer may as well be called Kao The Copycat, seeing as it contains the tropes of a middling platformer, ones where ideas are cribbed liberally from better established videogame franchises; you may wonder why Kao The Kangaroo has been resurrected at all. Then you sit down and play this re-emergence of Kao and discover it’s actually pretty good.

No, Kao isn’t doing anything you haven’t seen before, but it’s been so lavishly recreated, harkening back to a simpler time for platforming videogames, that it becomes a welcome ray of sunshine and a breath of fresh air in the genre, rather than another me-too like its predecessors were back in the day. Kao has evolved into something a wee more prominent and recognizable now, meaning it won’t be as soon forgotten as its predecessors.

The story is generic but the simplicity of it helps ease you into what the world has to offer. After Kao endures a nightmare where he witnesses his sister Kaia being sucked into the maw of a gloomy demonic force, he awakens and speaks with his mummy about the whereabouts of his sister, as well as his long-lost father, and your task is to search far and wide to find them again. All the while, a dark force has enveloped your home world of Hopalloo Island, and you need to put a stop to it. To do this Kao must contend with the so-called “fighting masters”, who have been possessed by this blight, and he’ll need to save his most devastating hooks and haymakers for the nefarious Eternal Warrior, the reason Kao’s land is in grave peril.

Hoppaloo Island and the lands you visit are vibrant open areas that can be explored freely. Stuffed with collectibles and gateways to new levels, these wide explorable areas aren’t teeming with activity or ways to meaningfully interact with characters, but if you like gallivanting about and picking up treasures, then Kao will feel soothingly old school. However, like the rest of the experience, you will be reminded of how little Kao pays attention to the evolution of platformers in the past couple of decades, which does become its largest undoing.

Bouncing, bounding and boxing belligerent bozos is all par for the course for Kao, all contained in a breezily accessible platforming package that’s easy to grasp and garner gratification from. Along the way, you will pick up boomerangs and use them to trigger silhouetted platforms so you can reach otherwise inaccessible areas, clamber up and along meshing to make progress, hoovering up several types of collectible, smash big red buttons to solve minor environmental puzzles, and bopping grunts in the face with your unbridled boxing ability.

Kao plays like a comfortable throwback much of the time, so much so that you might indulge too heavily in how welcoming the game makes you feel. Despite the various pleasantries on offer with Kao, it doesn’t do anything to separate itself from the competition, the brief length only serving to make sure you move on quickly after completion.

It all feels rather antiquated, especially when you find yourself collecting up the rune stones to satisfy a required toll, so you can gain access to a single level. Participating in a platforming level in a videogame isn’t a reward or a gift from a shop, it’s a challenge so you can make progress towards the end-level boss and unto the completion of the game; yet Kao sticks rigidly to convention, by making you find mostly-meaningless collectibles in order to open up new areas and levels.  

The occasional boss encounter puts your skills to the test too, requiring well timed manoeuvrability, platforming and combat 101 to get by. Boss battles follow a rote formula wherein you will need to dodge their attacks, give them a bish, bash and bosh to deplete their health meter, where they’ll recover and conjure up a new attack which ramps up in difficulty, then you continue to attack them when you get the chance and then hey presto you beat the boss. Akin to the game itself, these boss battles are welcome and provide a serviceable if predictable and easy challenge, but they’ll be forgotten soon after they are bested. They’re minor roadblocks, which do require some variation and on-point precision to beat despite their novice sense of challenge.

Conclusion

The return of Kao The Kangaroo after a prolonged hibernation is both a blessing and a curse. Blooming with colour, bolstered by simple pick up and play stylings, and presented as a glittering throwback to the golden age of platformers, all help Kao to blossom beautifully. Yet Kao’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness, as it fails to bring anything new to a grounded genre formula, nor is it long enough to stay ingrained in the memory as it’s over all too soon. You might think it impolite to ask why of all classic platformers did Kao have to come back after all these years, and even though you might still ponder this upon completion, you may just find that this return was well worth investing time into.    

This game was reviewed based on Xbox One review code, using an Xbox One console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.