I beat Kao the Kangaroo 4, and it has the greatest innovation any beat-em-up/platformer hybrid has made: letting you run past the beat ‘em up parts! Kidding aside, the game does start having more mandatory combat segments as you progress, and then you start noticing that the platforming never evolves past world 1 difficulty, and then you notice the new enemies are just reskins of old enemies and that the beat-em-up segments don’t evolve, either. Bosses are also simplistic and boring, only giving you trouble due to finnicky mechanics like when you have to knock the second boss’s projectiles back at it, but the shot falls vertically and is small and disappears when it hits the ground and your attack to knock it back is also short-range. Besides finnicky stuff like that, the only time I got tripped up was when the game had what looked like a small dead end, but rotating the camera 180 degrees revealed a ladder above the entrance that you wouldn’t be able to see otherwise. Not recommended.

I did beat a good game afterward, though:

Platformer. Left/right move, A double-jumps, and your forward-dash is mapped both to B and X. You can also duck, but that’s only ever useful approximately three times, including optional levels. The game has a bunch of different gimmicks, each of which are segregated between the game’s six chapters, and there are green cubes you can collect to unlock “hard mode” levels that are actually a completely new set of 12 levels for each chapter. If that description reminds you of Celeste, don’t worry; letting go of forward actually stops you immediately, even in midair! Dashes are always a fixed-length and can’t be interrupted, but again, if you’re not holding forward, you don’t keep moving forward when the dash is over (unless you jump while dashing, but IIRC that’s never needed since regular forward jumping is about as fast). Jumps are also always a fixed height (no short hops), which is fine for the most part, but there are a few times where you need to do some awkward movements since you need to jump, but also need to avoid something you’d hit at the peak of your jump.

Another thing you can do is grab on platform-ledges and nooks in walls, but the window for doing this is quite precise. Obviously if you’re a pixel too low, you miss even if it looks like you shouldn’t, but if you’re too high, you get blocked by the platform’s upper corner and need to fall down a bit before you grab onto it. You can also climb onto platforms form this hanging position–not by pushing up, but by pushing forward. Sure, you don’t need to push forward to grab the ledge since that happens automatically as long as you’re directly beside the wall when you reach the correct elevation, but you sure as heck need to hold forward to reach the ledge in the first place, which makes it easy to accidentally climb into spikes due to having only a split second between grabbing and climbing. It takes some getting-used-to, to say the least.

Side note: if you’re dashing when you collide with the upper corner of a platform, instead of stopping and falling like normal, you clip on top of the platform and keep going until your dash is up–even if there’s spikes on the platform, in which case you also die.

Level design is pretty good. The first three chapters are usually pretty good about introducing their gimmicks safely, but afterward, it’s a toss up, as gimmick introductions tend to have enough danger around that you’ll likely die a couple times just trying to figure them out. Some levels require tricky movements before the game has trained you enough to know said moves are doable (like maybe you need to jump further than you realize can be done in order to save collapsing blocks for later), but most levels are designed in a way that makes it clear what you have to do as long as you take a moment to look around. This actually leads into my next praise: every level is only one screen large, so there are no surprises that come from a scrolling screen. You can always take your time to plan out your moves instead of being forced to react to new things quickly…for the most part. See, a bunch of levels have crucial objects (spikes, springs, etc.) completely covered up by other, larger objects (like collapsing blocks or TNT), so you won’t see them until after you get the other thing out of the way–but by then, you’ve likely planned out moves that don’t involve the unseen objects and will likely have to restart the level with your new knowledge. I sent the devs an e-mail asking them to change this, so hopefully it’ll be fixed by the time you play.

Collectible cubes can also be obscured behind objects in the same way, making those ones easy to miss, but that’s as unintuitive as those cubes get. Most of them are in plain view as soon as the screen is loaded, and even if you miss one, the stage select clearly identifies which level has a cube you missed, so you can go straight to the level in question and only have to worry about what it might be hidden behind. This is a massive improvement over how Celeste hid its own B-side levels–and dare I say even how it hid some of its strawberries–since you don’t have to worry about hidden split paths; everything is right there on screen, even if you have to move something else out of the way to see it. Just remember to save the Hard mode levels until after you beat all the Normal mode levels to maintain the game’s difficulty curve. Yup, this game has an actual difficulty curve as well (barring the occasional difficulty spike), unlike…you know.

Unfortunately, the layering issue isn’t the only graphical problem. First one of these you’ll notice is that collapsing blocks are the same color as solid tiles in multiple chapters–including Chapter 1, when you’re still getting used to everything. Their pattern/shape isn’t that different, either, and can result in some nasty surprises when you’re not expecting it. What’s really baffling is that in Chapter 4, collapsing blocks are a completely different color than solid tiles, so I don’t get why they didn’t do this for the whole game. The only reason this isn’t a bigger issue is because by Chapter 5, practically every block is a collapsing block, so you begin to expect to have to move quickly until you reach the goal.

Speaking of Chapter 5, there are a couple graphic issues there as well. Like other chapters, this one has its own tileset, but it’s one that makes nooks in walls hard to notice unless you’re looking right at them. This is because the blocks’ bright outline is thick enough that the nook never reaches the dark center of the tileset, and since the background is similarly bright, the two can blend together. Also, one of the gimmicks in this chapter is a powerup that turns you into a fireball (move forward automatically, push A to flip between moving diagonally up and diagonally down–or use up/down so you don’t accidentally flip twice), and being in fireball-mode causes everything to glow white…including formerly-harmless waterfalls, which kill you in fireball mode. They really should have had them glow a distinct color in fireball-mode, not only to make them easier to see, but also to hint towards their sudden lethality.

Still, I was willing to forgive all these issues because of how much the game gets right, but then I made it to the Chapter 4 boss. See, one of the gimmicks is that certain levels have power generators you need to destroy by dashing into them, and this boss is themed after a power generator. It’s also the first boss (of two) in the game, so your only frame of reference are said power generators. Thing is, dashing into the boss does nothing. The logical progression is that all other power generators were oriented vertically, but the boss is oriented horizontally, so maybe you need to time the bouncing platform to hit the boss from below, except doing that just got me killed. After several failed attempts, I looked up a walkthrough (the only time I did so for this game), and it turns out you have to grab onto the boss like a platform, causing it to fall down like a collapsing block and causing its weak point to appear, and that is what you dash into to damage the boss. The closest you get to a hint for this in-game is that the symmetrical arena has a corner opening above the boss, but that could just as easily be decoration since the solid tiles staircase upward going toward the top-center of the screen. The boss has a second phase, which is much more intuitive since it’s basically a regular level, but now you have to wait on the giant worm boss to move out of your way.

The second (final) boss is better by default, but bosses are not this game’s strong suit. The first phase is just four electric balls going up and down while the boss shoots at you, but you have to go back and forth across that same setup several times since the boss’s new weak point keeps appearing on the opposite side of where you are. Its second phase is just another standard wait-to-attack pattern-memorization boss, where even though you die in one hit and the boss’s three different patterns are very similar to each other, you still have to do it all in one go.

Beating all the normal mode levels unlocks a seventh chapter called “The Lost Levels.” I’m convinced that this chapter consists of levels that were cut from the main game because it has its own difficulty curve, going back to being very easy at the beginning and slowly going through each previous chapter’s themes and gimmicks (though it does have a couple new gimmicks of its own, and its own difficulty spikes). There’s even at least one level where an entire chunk is optional, adding credence to my “cut levels” hypothesis since that could have been where a collectible cube was placed (The Lost Levels doesn’t have any cubes or its own hard mode). Beating all the Hard mode levels just gets you an achievement for each chapter; you don’t unlock anything or even get so much as a “congratulations on beating all the Hard mode levels!” message.

Overall, this is a similar case to the game I previously posted about in that it was really close to being really good, but missed the mark due to various issues and a problematic boss fight. Still worth getting on sale, though.

P.S. Hard mode levels have their own gimmick on top of reusing their chapter’s normal mode gimmick. For chapter 2’s hard mode, the new gimmick is auto-dash spaces, and for whatever reason, these do give you some momentum, but the levels are usually designed in a way so this isn’t much of an issue. In contrast, Chapter 5’s hard mode introduces spiked drones that chase you during fireball mode–the mode where you have little control over your movement. Again, it’s fine for the most part, but there are a couple times where you need to be very precise with where you move, even though the game doesn’t properly prepare you for this.