Recent reviews by ☆｢Emily Scarlet｣

Cause: SEA community.

Now after I heard about #Kao4Australia and knowing that all of its sales profits will be donated to help Australia with the wildfire incident (within a given period), I'll share the words to the others.

It is just too bad I received this game for free.😔

I'll help by donating directly to WIRES

and by buying the game as a gift for my friends as much as I could.


=========================================

Did some proofreading to the review for better readability.



=========================================

My thoughts so far:




This game itself is a part of a trilogy made by Tate Multimedia back in 2005. The sequel of Kao the Kangaroo.

It is a linear 3D-platformer game where the player has to reach the end of each level, which presumably took heavy inspiration from Crash Bandicoot or Ray-Man series.

So you play as Kao, the titular protagonist of this series, and you are tasked to save his friends from an evil hunter.

There are about 20 levels spread throughout the world that you have to complete, and you have to defeat certain bosses before you can fight the final boss (yes, the evil hunter).

I'll be frank on this one, I can't find something noteworthy about the mechanics of this game. Just like any other game with platformer genre, this game has similar set of features, such as finding collectables, like coins (which you’ll have to collect until a certain amount by grinding to be able to bribe the guard), stars (for every 50 stars you collect each time your abilities will gradually become stronger), and crystals (collect these to unlock certain extra levels). Similarly, you just have to reach the end of each level to complete the main goal, and that’s it.

The player will encounter many types of enemies throughout the level and Kao will have to use a different strategy to counter each of them with his arsenal of attacks by pressing certain buttons which let Kao use punch combos, roll, tail-whip attack, stomp, and toss some boomerangs. Furthermore, his attacks can be upgraded to make it more powerful by collecting the stars as I mentioned above.

Also, each level has its unique ways to let the player interacts with it to complete its obstacles besides just running and jumping on several platforms, such as solve a puzzle to pass, trigger some switches, and even unique interaction with various objects, like sitting in a barrel, ropes, using a nut to knock down trees or balloons, use a catapult-like vehicle to destroy aerial enemies or knock down some obstacles to walk over later in the game, and many more.




It's an old game ported into PC, the graphics would not be as good as the others. But hey, it doesn't need a very powerful graphics processing power to run this game so it's a plus from me.

For the audio, the background music is very generic but it has that upbeat feel to suits up the level currently played, I like the fact they put sounds for different animals, funny sound effects, and kind of appropriate environmental ambient background noises. The game offers different voice actors for the cut scene dialogues depending on the language, I've personally tried both English (US) and English (GB) version (the player can choose the language they want when they launch the game).




- Kao is a very cute character ^_^
- Upgradeability for Kao's arsenal to make it stronger
- Many unique levels. As I’ve said before, some of the levels have unique interactive objects
- Challenging chase sequence
- One of the best 1-dollar-spent game




- Voice acting is quite bad
- Poorly-designed camera system, thus resulting in bad views making some of the fight scenes so annoying
- Too forgiving, with many health spreads out throughout the level, despite Kao's already large health-pool
- There isn’t really any reason to play it again after you finished the game other than killing some time at your weekend
- The game mechanics are nothing special compared to other games in the same genre




Kao the Kangaroo: Round 2 is a good solid 3D adventure game, even though it's not innovative (heavily influenced by Crash Bandicoot and Ray-Man). But, I think the players will probably get to play it partly because of all the hilariously silly situations Kao gets into, and the game isn't even that challenging in the first place. Nonetheless, players of all ages should be able to spend their weekend to enjoy this game at a cheap price.



=========================================

Now the sales period has ended, you guys can still help by donating directly to the relief fund website below ^_^

https://www.wires.org.au/donate/emergency-fund


Stay strong Australia🙏, this is the very least I could do.

Addictive, toxic community, without skins market the game is pretty much dead already.

Update 11/26/2020
---------------------------
yep.. still sucks

So you play this in a series of sessions known as ‘duties’. At the start of each duty you can spend the cash you’ve earned from previous duties on combinations of new vehicles, new staff and new equipment for the staff. You can shuffle your staff around their vehicles, in case you have empty seats left vacant by injured staff (which happens a lot, they’re off sick for a few days). Once you’re happy with your team (and usually having spent every last penny) you then start the duty by deploying your vehicles around the city map. Blue police, white medics and red fire crews. There are coloured dots around the map to mark stations/precincts – more important for ambulances which need to return injured civilians to the hospitals, less important for the police who are always moving around on patrol.

Then you start the duty and the clock starts ticking – you can speed up time, slow it down and even pause. Incidents start popping up on the map, colour-coded according to service required, and you have to select nearby unit(s) to send there. The incidents can be one single colour, 2 or sometimes even all 3. Once you’ve sent a unit you can just leave them to get on with it and switch your attention to the next one. Sometimes the event starts off small but then for example the officers come under fire, people become injured, transport is needed to pick up perps etc etc so you often have to send additional units to clear the incident, and you can end up with multiple units tied up on one incident while others are popping up all over the place. It can get quite hectic, as you’d expect.

Around 1 in 3 incidents is initiated by a 911 call (not all of them). There’s voice acting for the callers and you have to select multi-choice responses to gather information. The most important info is the address of the incident, and once you have that then it pops up on the map so you can send your units while the caller is still talking.

Each time you successfully deal with an incident you get reputation points for it. If you fail, time out or ignore one then points are deducted. At the end of the duty you’re presented with a shopping list of your results, with reputation points and cash totals at the end. Failed items lose you 3 or 4 times more points than what you gain for success, so it’s important to cover as many as you possibly can, which is why you need to spend your cash on more and more vehicles and staff.

Rinse and repeat…

There are two gameplay modes:

1. Career mode
The game sets you a series of 6 cities and you have to work your way through them. There are two sub-modes within this mode: Unique Stories – you have to maintain positive reputation in order to progress but the game throws everything at you so it’s harder to keep your head above water; Daily Routine where there’s steady difficulty and you don’t have any problem gaining points, but you have to collect a certain number of points in each city in order to unlock the next one, so you have to play multiple duties in each city to build up your points, and each city is more difficult than the last, so harder to get points.

2. Free mode
You can pick any city in the world and the map for it will be downloaded. You can try lots of cities or stick to your favourite one. Either way, the cash and reputation points for the city are saved from one duty to the next so you can build it up, buy more items etc. and all your previously played cities are kept in a nice list.


The layout of everything is nicely done, easy to understand, with good use of colours. It’s not a game you would play for the graphics, it’s more functional than fancy, but pleasant on the eye. Background music is unremarkable but not annoying either. You’re too busy paying attention to the calls to notice it anyway.

I first saw this game when it appeared on Greenlight. There was an example of one of the 911 calls used in the game which at first seemed like a prank call with someone ordering pizza which then turned out to be a coded hostage situation. Wow! I thought. They must have a huge database of real 911 calls and there will be all kinds of interesting stuff like this to experience. Then I read about playing any city in the world! I was blown away, this game was going to be incredible!

The reality I’m afraid is more mundane. That pizza call is by far the most interesting call in the game, and there are very few others. It’s like the trailer for a bad movie, looks great but then you find out the bit in the trailer is the only part worth watching. Within 30 minutes of playing the calls already start to repeat, and by the 2-3 hour mark I knew them all by heart. As for the city maps, there are no landmarks or anything recognisable, they are just street networks, all look the same just in different shapes. The only way I can discern London from any other city is by the shape of the river. Everyone in every country in the world says the same thing in the same American accent.


There’s a short tutorial to start. There’s not all that much to learn so you get into the meat of it soon enough. You can select easy, medium, hard difficulty and it also ramps up in career mode. In general, the difficulty is dictated by how quickly the incidents appear. It also gets easier/harder depending on how big your team is, which is dictated by the amount of cash you earn and so on. What I will say is that there’s not much in the way of new/different mechanics being introduced – just new types of vehicles/staff/equipment – and the game consists of doing the same


-It's very casual, and based on your judgement.
-The phone calls are sometimes hilarious, and I feel they might have taken actual calls out to 911.
-It's not too traumatizing, if there were a level of extreme phone calls with 10 being the highest I would say the most extreme I have found is a 6.
-The ability to specify teams to certain task in the game, which is really helpful.
-Can play in your own town, I found this part neat!


-After sometime the calls become repetitive
-Not for someone who expects alot. Very few objects in the game, very little in certain areas of the game.
-Definitely not for hardcore people or people who expect a progressive storyline. Save you the trouble there is no story, it's just a 911 operator simulator, without the normal game progression of unlocking anything new only earning more cash until you have a productive team for really busy maps.


It's a 911 operator simulator with some cars, people, and customization ability. It is very casual and just a game you can relax and learn how 911 operators are supposed to deal with situations. Don't expect a whole hell of a lot out of this, if it's too little in content maybe wait for a sale one day. But the game is worth it for people who just like non complicated relaxed strategy simulators.