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.


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Did some proofreading to the review for better readability.



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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.



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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.