Alright, let’s try this one more time.

Kao the Kangaroo is a reboot of the original mascot 3D platformer series that started in 2000 with its original trilogy. It never sold that well to my knowledge (and having played the original, I think I can more or less make out why), which is why in the wake of the era of the 3D platformer revival, I actually was quite surprised that this got greenlit and announced for release this year. I basically bought the reboot day 1 on Steam back in May, and gave it my best go, but the game was a buggy mess upon release; there were a ton of reports of some users (not all, but enough to where the outcry took up almost all of the Steam Community Forums for the game) suffering from save corruption, where after entering the second world, the game would refuse to save any further progress, meaning that those players would have to beat the game all in one day without any crashes. I called it quits at that time, and wasn’t sure when I’d pick it back up (no chance for a refund, having played more than 2 hours)… well, until today, when my crippling brain disease of wanting to 100% as many games as possible on Steam kicked in. So I ran through the whole thing in a single day, and how does it hold up now?

Honestly, you could take my description of the original game (“an aggressively mediocre mascot 3D platformer”) and put it in the context of the indie 3D platformers of new, and that’s basically this game. You play as the Kao the Kangaroo, hopping around to defeat this evil immortal spirit that has possessed once venerable martial arts masters and turned them into pawns of commercialization and resource exploitation, and find his sister who’s run away from home to find their father who disappeared and since everyone’s kind of incompetent, you’re the only hope that’s left. I’m not going into any further detail than that, as the story’s world building is rather banal and I don’t really think there’s anything memorable of note about any of the characters whatsoever; all you need to know is that you are a kangaroo that can punch things really hard and the big bad are possessing everyone so they can be rich and famous and take over the world and stuff.

You travel around four worlds of mostly linear levels, with a boss in each world as well that you have to beat up so they too can have their own moment where they hold their head in their hands sitting down slumped while going “what have I done????!!!?!!111?!” The original Kao was more or less described by some as a Crash Bandicoot clone, and that’s fortunately not really the case here; there are some divergent paths that will lead to the “KAO” letters as collectibles as well as Eternal Wells that are basically the Time Rifts from A Hat in Time but bad. That's because they’re all really dark and cramped and serve no purpose other than to get a few coins and some diamonds. It’s pretty by the books 3D platforming otherwise; you run down corridors, jump over some gaps and up some cliffs, punch a lot of enemies, run down more hallways, break a lot of crates and barrels for that sweet sweet coin, you get the idea. The two main wrinkles here are that you’ll eventually get elemental powerups for your gloves for environmental interactions (i.e. use the Fire powerup to melt ice and burn spiderwebs) and there are spirit crystals that you can punch to temporarily activate dark crystal platforms.

Now, onto the bad:

-Despite having fixed the save corruption glitch, the game is still very, very bugged and has some pretty poor programming at times; it’s hard to tell which is which. There are the silly glitches of course, like boxes and crates not breaking into pieces when you punch them and then suddenly disappearing, or audio glitches such as when the background music will just stop playing or when no sound effect plays upon picking up a KAO letter. But those are small potatoes compared to the more damaging glitches; for example, there’s still a notable bug in Frosty Canyon where if you use the trampolines at any time (whether to collect coins or to quickly travel to a previous area from a hidden path) the ground slam attack stops working, as in you can input the action and it won’t come out. This softlocks the level because you need the ground slam to freeze water to push blocks along the ice, so as a result this was a level reset for me and cost me about half an hour or so. Similarly, there’s a glitch in the second to last level where a platform was already activated via the fire powerup slam but was stuck in place for some reason, so I couldn’t progress further down the level and had to again reset. And of course, there were multiple instances where I got stuck between several unbreakable objects (or in one case, near the end of the second to last level, phased through the wall of an unbreakable crate in the last room and couldn’t get out) and had to again, reset my level progress. Looks like there’s still a lot of debugging to be done!

-The hitboxes and hurtboxes of objects and enemies are rather wonky; there are a ton of instances where I was standing right in front of a checkpoint pole and punching it for coins/health, where my first two hits would contact the checkpoint pole but the third hit would often completely miss for no apparent reason. This also happens a lot while using the aerial tail spin attack, which would often phase right through enemies despite seemingly contacting their models, or how while mashing the attack button, attacks would randomly miss to the left or right of the models while hits inbetween would land. Also, sometimes enemies fail to disappear on time when their health is fully depleted and will still hit you with lingering attacks/hitboxes despite being downed.

-Combat generally still feels good enough, even with the aforementioned bugs/poor programming, but it’s a bit too mindless. You can just mash the attack button to punch spam your way through, and then hit the slow-mo slam button (not to be confused with the manual aerial ground slam) when your meter has built up enough thanks to enough consecutive hits. Even while taking some hits, there are enough I-frames to where this mindless strategy will beat everything in your path, since the slow-mo slam will take out most enemies near you or stun them long enough to where they’re basically helpless to be punched until they disappear, and you’ll often get hearts from defeating enemies anyways to recover health.

-On that note, this game is pretty damn easy, and not in a good way; you’re incentivized to collect permanent health powerups (collect 4 and gain the ability to take another hit), and the game is constantly throwing extra life collectibles and heart drops in all the levels. You can also punch the checkpoint poles every time you get to a new one to get a heart drop. As a result, I was often at or near full health, and had over 24 extra lives by the end of the game, with maybe only 3 actual in game deaths and I didn’t even need to purchase any extra lives for 500 coins.

-Gems are supposedly the rarer collectible when compared to coins, given how you often need to throw yourself into more danger (i.e. over pits of lava, spike traps, etc) to collect them. But they don’t even do anything! I was never able to find any way to redeem them for rewards (whereas you can at least buy costumes/permanent health upgrades/extra lives with coins), so while there’s a counter tracking how many gems you’ve found per level, they just sit there and exist.

-The grappling hook momentum physics are the absolute worst. When holding onto a grappling hook, you’ll swing back and forth as expected, but sometimes when you let go of the grappling hook at the end of a swing, Kao turns 90 degrees to the left/right and launches in that direction or at times will even launch away from the apex of the swing. So I often had to grab onto the grappling hook again to correct my drift, and that isn’t a surefire solution either because Kao inconsistently turns or will not turn around on a regrab (you can’t rotate the way you’re facing or your direction of swing while hanging onto a grappling hook either) and sometimes may have been propelled far away enough to where a regrab is out of range. This is the only part of the game that I would consider “difficult” because I could not find a consistent way to get off of grappling hooks as I’d like, and would constantly propel into walls or depths; even when I’d say it was doable, I’d often have to correct against the inconsistent drift by tilting the joystick in the other direction, and would barely land on the platform.

-I’ve made fun of the story/worldbuilding/characters already, but the voice acting as part of this package is atrocious. I get not having the budget to hire a localization team to get dedicated voice actors for English or other languages, but the current voice actors sound very inexperienced at best and extremely forced/stilted at worst and will quip a generic NPC dialogue line every minute or so as you progress further through a level. The bland dialogue lines unfortunately made me care even less about what was going on to drive the plot forward.

-There are a bunch of other bugs that I haven’t even addressed which have been found by other users; I’m not sure if these have been fixed since then, but considering that the latest post hasn’t been addressed by the developers, I would suggest you err on the side of caution.

I dunno, I think the reboot is at least a better product and more fun to play than the original Kao the Kangaroo from 2000 (a very low bar, I’m aware), but after 100%ing it myself, I can’t actually think of any reason to recommend this over A Hat in Time or Psychonauts 2. The characters are all boring, the story feels rather inconsequential, the NPCs don’t even change their dialogue after beating the boss in each area or the final boss so your actions feel like they have no impact, I barely felt challenged or engaged despite being the target demographic, there are bugs galore yet not a single danger noodle to be found in the land down under… I could go on and on, but ultimately I think this is one of the 3D platformers of all time, and that is unfortunately the nicest thing I can say about it.

Reviewed on Sep 20, 2022


4 Comments


1 year ago

yikes I didn't know this game is so broken. It feels like the kind of stuff you'd see in a game that released around the time the original Kao the Kangaroo, not 2022.

1 year ago

Yeah it's... bad. Keep in mind that this was several months after they finally patched the memory corruption bug, and there are still people running into game breaking bugs that prevent progression.

1 year ago

What hurts me the most is when the game refuses to give you a platinum trophy (I played it on ps5) despite knowing you 100% everything. FeelsBadMan

1 year ago

Yeah, there's no actual reward for collecting all the scrolls or the gems, so like... why bother? Very glad I did not play this on PS5 now lmao