• Kao the Kangaroo: Round 2
  

  5 hours playtime

  4 of 9 achievements

This is a platformer. Left stick moves, A double-jumps, X does a three-hit combo. On the ground, B does a roll move which I rarely found useful, but pushing it in the air does a ground-pound which is necessary to push certain switches. The Y button will use your limited ranged attack on levels that give you ammo (its reduced to zero after each level).

One of the first things you’ll notice is that the controls are unresponsive. When you land, you can’t jump again until after your landing animation is finished. If you attack on the ground, you can’t move until after your attack animation is finished. Even moving sucks; I lost count of how many times I’d be holding forward, and suddenly see my character’s speed and walking animation slow to a crawl. Turns out, the left stick’s deadzone is too large, and there’s no option to change it (can’t even remap movement to the D-pad on an Xbox 360 controller); this means that if you aren’t holding the stick all the way forward (and sometimes even when you are), you won’t move at top speed, which not only makes basic enemy encounters a chore, but is especially frustrating during timed segments where lava is rising or a bomb is about to destroy the platform you’re on. If you want to turn around, don’t snap the stick straight backward because that’ll take half-a-second to register and another half-second to happen; instead, rotate the stick 180-degrees to get the desired responsiveness. The game has stars you can collect, and every 50 is supposed to give you a new ability (50=float down after double jump, 100=”more efficient” jump attack); when I got 200, it said I could “run as much as you want” and at first I thought “the movement bug was intentional?” but no, it kept happening! I knew games could be unpolished, but this is some next-level neglect.

However, not all of the game’s challenge comes from bad controls; there are some enemy and level design issues as well. One of the earliest levels is a chase scene, but the camera is facing away from where you’re going; combine that with how fast you’re moving, how close you are to the bottom of the screen, and the game’s own graphics having the greenery continue down the wall a bit, and there’s hardly any time to react to incoming jumps. There are spiders which hang from the ceiling and shoot homing shots at you, shots that’d be difficult to dodge even without control issues (and if you’re in a barrel-riding segment with thin halls, there’s literally no room to dodge at all). The only way you have a real chance at avoiding damage is if you lock on and shoot them as soon as they drop down. Yeah, turns out the game had a lock-on button the whole time (R1) except it’s not really a lock-on button; it’s a strafe button, and if your character isn’t facing the enemy in question (or is too far away), you won’t lock-on and will just go into strafe mode. World 2 introduces ice physics: you’re constantly moving forward and can only turn, but the camera doesn’t turn with you to help show where you’re going. You can also only single-jump instead of double-jump, and when you land, you spin out for a second (still moving forward) and can’t do anything until your character gets back up. Late in the first ice level, the ground starts cracking and falling into water (instant death), but the cracks spawn instantly and some are big enough that you can fall into the water even before the platforms start sinking, and if you happen to be walking right where a gap opens up, you just fall and die and can’t do anything about it. You can also get stuck between two sinking platforms, unable to move or jump and just have to wait for them to kill you. There’s also a snowboarding level; the camera faces forward this time, but you have to hit grind-rails to get over some gaps. They widen near the ground, making you think the game is being a bit more generous, but no; you still need to be centered or you’ll just clip through. The game has stalactites that will fall on you, but their shadows can barely be seen in the lava level (if at all), and the shadows won’t spawn in the first place if they’re too close to the edge of a platform. There’s a racing level where you’re in a motorboat; you hold forward to move (none of the face-buttons do anything here), but this isn’t fast enough to get you first place (which you need to beat the level), so you just have to hit every button until you figure out that R1 does a boost move that gives the AI opponents no chance of catching up with you. The underwater levels have controls similar to Super Mario 64’s underwater controls (left stick aims, A moves you forward), but there aren’t any enemies until the manta ray at the end which shoots at you so much that you don’t have much time to reorient yourself to see where the shots are coming from to begin dodging them in time. There’s a level where you’re on a torpedo; if you run into the walls or through poisonous gas, you take damage, but there’s no feedback animation on your character; you’d only notice if you look at the upper-left corner of the screen (where your health is) instead of where you’re going. There’s a level where you ride a bird and are told you can “flap its wings” five times before you have to land. You’d think that means 5 jumps, but after the second, your speed drops dramatically (this is standard and has nothing to do with the aforementioned deadzone); the only way to keep your speed is if you make all five jumps at the beginning, in a row. When you make it in the pirate ship, you’ll encounter boarded-up doors, and punching them does nothing. Turns out, the only way past them is if you use that rolling move which isn’t used anywhere else in the game.

Bosses also have their issues. The first one has certain platforms glow, and you’re supposed to ground pound them, but ground-pounding is used so rarely that I had forgotten about it at this point. The second boss is just a series of enemies that you use your ranged weapon to defeat. The third boss, despite being underwater, has yet another control scheme where you’re auto-moving forward and just aim up/down, and once you shoot all your targets, a turtle comes up from behind you and suddenly jump-cuts you to controlling a torpedo in a winding tunnel. The final boss is the worst since it has a move where it throws a bomb onto the arena that breaks a hole into lava and creates a flame that you need to jump over as it moves across the arena, except the location of the hole doesn’t correlate to the location the bomb lands and the final boss flies low enough that you can hit it and take damage while trying to jump over the flame. Plus, some flames get left behind and they have a larger hit-box than they should. The second phase of the boss has you running past platforms before bombs blow them up, and this is the most difficult due to the aforementioned unresponsive controls suddenly slowing you down for no reason. The third phase has the boss running away from you and taking cover behind destructible objects; not as bad as what the game has done up to now, but the boss will escape if you aren’t fast enough and the game never tells you this (and you start back at phase one if this happens).

Not recommended. Even if it were polished, it focuses too much on stage gimmicks and ends up being kinda bland most of the time, getting most of its challenge from the unresponsive controls. Ironically, I think it could’ve been okay if instead of adding all the gimmicks, they just focused on perfecting the platforming aspect.