Review: Kao the Kangaroo (2022)

destructoid.com:

Kao the Kangaroo, somehow, eluded me all these years. I know! You’re talking to the person who would rent every single mascot platformer they could get their hands on from a young age. Aero the Acro-Bat? Yes please. Jersey Devil? You know it. Despite it being around since the year 2000, I hadn’t even come in contact with this franchise.

Until now, with the 2022 reboot.

Kao the Kangaroo (PC, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X [reviewed])Developer: Tate MultimediaPublisher: Tate MultimediaReleased: May 27, 2022MSRP: $29.99

Kao is on a quest to save his sister, and that’s pretty much as far as the narrative goes. You’ll meet some goofy friends and family members along the way (and a stoic mentor that also ends up playing a bit goofy), but most of their wooden performances betray their outlandish and colorful character designs. The story is often silly, very campy, and doesn’t go out of its way to draw you in. Kao himself is merely a vessel for raw action platforming, and the skip-cutscene button will be used liberally by many.

All that said, there is a lot of heart in the core of Kao the Kangaroo, as the team clearly knows the genre inside and out. Level designs are spot on in the sense that they’re open-ended enough, but aren’t so sprawling that they’re filled with labyrinthine corridors that go nowhere; nor are they under-designed from an aesthetic and mechanical standpoint. Even things as granular as idle animations for Kao show that the creators clearly care about these types of games.

Levels — which are broken up by individual instanced hub zones — don’t feel cramped or bloated, and are frequently filled by light puzzle elements that are just below the threshold of frustrating at worst. Stage