ic-games Review - Kao – The Kangaroo Round 2 - Reviews, Previews and Interviews for PC, Xbox 360, PS2, PS3 and Wii

ic-games Review - Kao – The Kangaroo Round 2 - Reviews, Previews and Interviews for PC, Xbox 360, PS2, PS3 and Wii ic-games Review - Home - Review, Preview and Interview for PC, Xbox,Xbox 360, PS2, PS3 and Wii

Kao – The Kangaroo Round 2

Information
Reviewer: James Collins
Developer: tate interactive
Publisher: JoWooD Productions
Reviewed: Xbox
Genre: Platform
UK Release: 15th Apr 2005
Article Date: 13th Mar 2005
Difficulty: Medium
Retail Price: £39.99
Price Comparison:
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Score Breakdown

Experience:
Game Play:
Graphics:
Sound:
Overall Score: 83%

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Pros

Polished Graphics

Solid Environment interaction

Very fast gameplay

Cons

'Slow' voice acting

Screenshots

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Things are certainly picking up for the platform fan this year. What with the pretty decent Legend of Kay, that had more than enough things going for it. Now JoWood have turned their attention to the marsupial with boxing gloves, known lovingly as ‘Kao Kangaroo’. The first encounter was disappointing, but as IC-Games found out, Round 2 has a lot more tricks up its furry sleeves this time around.

After a brief, and to be honest boring introduction, things improved as soon as we finally got to control Kao. The forest levels (the first you’ll encounter in Kao 2) was colourful, graphically impressive and more importantly pretty easy to navigate. Obviously the first few levels were nothing more than walkthrough levels to get you used to Kao’s controls and environment but even these levels maintained our interest throughout.

The game actually starts off with you (Kao) trapped in a cage ready to be shipped off for indescribable torture. It seems that all the animals in Kao’s land are being captured one by one and shipped off for slavery. Fortunately for you, it seems that a nearby parrot thinks you are the only one that can stop this madness and swoops down and breaks you out of your cage. Once released by the parrot, you’ll start off in a central hub (the park) and must battle though locations before new avenues open up. There is no doubt that the style is reminiscent of the better Crash Bandicoot games which can only be a good thing. The comedy isn’t perhaps as apparent, but Kao more than makes up for it with the diversity of things you’ll be called upon to do during the levels. For example during the forest levels you could be called upon to rescue animals, to run away from a stampeding bear or to navigate an exploding walkway where time is certainly of the essence. This is where Kao excels above most platform games; boredom rarely has time to set in.

The controls are pretty easy to get accustomed to, Kao utilises just about every platform trick in the book to great effect. Jumps and double jumps are only a button click away, as are stomps (which can take out the hardier creatures). Kao can also pick up boomerangs (20 at a time) to take out enemies from a distance but as you would expect, Kao prefers to get in nice and close where he can make perfect use of his permanent boxing gloves. There aren’t the diverse attack routines as we got with JoWoods brilliant Legend of Kay but what you do get fits in perfectly with the gameplay.

Graphically this is a platform fans wet dream. The world that Kao lives in is both colourful and interesting with many nooks and crannies to explore. Kao also uses far more interaction with the environment which makes a pleasant treat. And it’s not only the environment that has been lavished with some impressive graphical finesse but so has the enemies that Kao has to defeat to progress, all this while maintaining a pretty fast frame rate. This is most apparent when you reach the time attack levels which has Kao running as fast as he can to avoid almost certain death. We mentioned the bear chase sequence above but Kao is literally littered with these bonus levels that while do little to forward the plot (this is a platformer after all) are still incredibly fun to play. Not once during these fast paced action levels did we notice the frame rate drop which is pretty impressive when you take into account the amount of detail being projected during some of these levels.

In an otherwise extremely polished game Kao suffers from a few small gameplay glitches and annoyances. The sound effects and soundtrack are not as impressive but they do get the job done. The voice acting let the side down the most though with many of the voices sounding flat and uninspiring. It’s certainly a shame that the same amount of time wasn’t lavished on this department as what obviously was spent on the graphics. In our opinion the voice acting also suffered a little from it’s ‘pace’ everything seemed to be read out a little slow and much of the dialog will be avoided by inpatient gamers.

On a more serious note, some levels suffered from the dreaded camera issues that have plagued platformers from the dawn of time but thankfully we only came across this on a few rare occasions, (however the cloud run and jump sequences will give gamers everywhere nightmares for weeks). Finally the black borders that adorn the top and bottom of the screen seemed misaligned and had gaps at the right of the screen. Hardly show stopping stuff but annoying in an otherwise faultless game.

"those prepared to give Kao the love and attention it deservers will find a more than capable adventure waiting inside..."

Kao the Kangaroo 2 is still a very competent platform game that will no doubt delight fans of the genre for hours on end. It doesn’t offer enough to convert the hardcore FPS player or anyone else that normally shies away from games like this, but those prepared to give Kao the love and attention it deservers will find a more than capable adventure waiting inside. Some may lament the fact that it’s a little on the short side, but really very few people could knock what the developer’s tate interactive have achieved. From start to finish Kao delivers a knock out punch to poor platformers everywhere.

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