Kao the Kangaroo: Round 2 (2003)

I love 3D platform adventure games.

I love the original Raymans (not as much as the newer ones mind you but they still hold a special spot in my heart), the Spyro franchise especially, and even some more obscure stuff like Starfox Adventures. I've even gone out of my way, due to missing that type of game, to hunt down more modern takes on the genre. This has lead me to play some pretty decent titles like Last Tinker and Yooka Laylee. Despite neither one being absolutely perfect by any measure, they definitely gave me that flavor I'd been missing since the genre had died back when I was a teenager.

So when, lo and behold, a 3D platform adventure game titled Kao The Kangaroo: Round 2 came to suddenly be free on Steam, I admit, I was pretty happy to snatch that bad boy right up and get back to the basics. At first glance, it's alright. It's cutesy and the music is nice and the colors are vibrant and it surprisingly, for what I'm presuming is a port, runs extremely smoothly, even by todays standards. But the more you pick away at it, the more you begin to see the diseased underbelly that lies just below the surface. See, one of the first major glaring issues (besides the voice acting being god awful, and I know, it's a kids game but holy god man) is that when you really think about it, none of it makes a whole lotta damn sense.

You're a Kangaroo. But your hub, and what I'm presuming is your home...is in a castle sort of area near some docks? And for some reason there's pirates around, and also you're trying to free animals who've been captured by a hunter. Not only that, but the animals you run into who can help you are not animals I'd normally expect to see in a game that features a Kangaroo. Beavers, for instance, as the prime example. There's "worlds", like with any 3D platform adventure title, but...they don't really make sense either outside of the generic "here's the ice world" template that they felt had to be tacked on because its what was featured heavily in EVERY title like that.

See, the thing about the other titles I mentioned, especially stuff like Spyro from my childhood, is that their world made sense. It had rules and logic. You could understand why Spyro was going to these places and all the places and creatures he encountered never felt out of place. Kao, on the other hand, feels like a bunch of half baked ideas and leftover assets from some other unreleased titles that they scrounged up and threw together to make this title. And while the general premise is fine, you're rescuing animals captured by a hunter (because, once again, that was sort of the general premise of ALL these games is you rescuing other characters from some archetypal villain), but when surrounded by these other things it too begins to fall apart.

You wanna make Kao a boxing Kangaroo who is trying to rescue animals captured by a hunter? Fine. Solid concept. But why not just base it in Australia? Why not just base in in the outback? Why throw in the random beavers and the ice world when those don't match whatsoever. Just makes no sense, really, and I know it's a lot of thought to put into a kids game, but even if I'd played this as a kid I would've been thoroughly confused as to why the fuck this was happening the way it was. Heck, the hunter could be stealing all sorts of Australian wildlife and you'd have to chase him down through various sorts of spots in Australia. There could be Koalas and maybe some big spiders or snakes, and the whole thing could be wrapped up neatly in a setting with a premise that makes sense. Nope. Beavers and ice.

And for whatever fucking reason, a shaman is the first villain you fight? A shaman surrounded by dragons, his setting eerily reminiscent of something out of the Adventures of Jackie Chan. Once again just plopping in more stuff that didn't fit anywhere else but can fit here so we can shelve it and sell it to stupid children who's equally stupid parents don't know any better. Money money money. Forget integrity and artistic merit. MONEY.

I know. I know. I sound so dumb complaining about a kids game from like 2003, but you also have to understand I have nothing better to do, so. In the end it isn't an atrocious mess, it's just an utterly confounding one that seems to be getting worse the deeper into it I get. It's playable, sure, but to what extent do we forgive everything else if the gameplay is decent enough? I'm one to talk too, because gameplay is generally ALL I care about and yet here I am extolling the virtues of plot and setting. I don't know man. I haven't left my bedroom in weeks. I'm stuck here playing this Kangaroo game. I'm not eating enough.

Somebody help me.