Kao the Kangaroo  Gameboy Advance

Features

27 levels
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Only for Game Boy Advance
Kao the Kangaroo's worst enemy is the development time the team gave his first Game Boy Advance adventure...this game just feels rushed right from the start. Boot up the game and you're faced with the title screen: box-art that's been "squished" to fit the wide GBA screen. The game's introduction makes absolutely no sense, as Kao's chased into a cage by a rather large hunter-type person...but then the game starts out with Kao completely unharmed, wearing a pair of red boxing gloves in some unrelated location. And what's the point of the Options menu? It's just the same difficulty selection that's offered at the start of the game.

Honestly, this design could have had any critter in the lead role...because Kao is as generic as platform heroes come. He looks like a kangaroo, sure, but there's nothing really kangaroo-like to his character design other than the boxing gloves (a 'roo stereotype I still haven't figured out) and arbitrary pouch. His moves are of the generic fare, too -- he can walk, jump, punch, tailwhip, and pounce down on enemies. Admittedly, the development team did add a clever feature where you can put the continue point anywhere in the level, just as long as you've collected the flag to do it.

It's the gameplay that gets hurt the most by the rushed feel. The task in Kao the Kangaroo, like in most generic side-scrolling platforms, is to get from the start of a level to the end relatively unscathed, avoiding and attacking enemy sprites while collecting coins from one end to the other. The collision detection in this design, though, is absolutely horrendous and just kills a lot of the fun that could be had in this game. Kao has to be absolutely spot-on to collect coins, because they're only triggered by Kao's chest...touch a coin with any other part of his body and he passes right through them. Attacking enemies is an equally frustrating action, since Kao's punch attack has almost no reach -- you literally have to get right on top of a bad guy to punch it with your gloves, making the move almost entirely useless.

Definitely the worst bit is how poorly balanced the game is, because the programmers failed to add any moments of safe invincibility after your character takes damage from an enemy...a charging enemy sprite will bump into Kao, and keep pushing him for additional damage. Most game designers would have turned off the collision detection at this point to let the gamer steer clear of this enemy after taking a hit, but in Kao you're bounced around by the same enemy over and over.

The graphics are decent, though, since the development team rendered Kao with a decent number of animation frames and created nicely drawn scenery for the scrolling backgrounds. But, man, the music is just the pits. The digitized audio is of high quality, but the tune competition is just downright grating. And there's no way to turn it off short of dialing down the volume switch...but then you don't get the cute voice of our hero squeaking away.