Kao The Kangaroo

A bout below the belt

- Oscar Taylor-Kent

INFO

FORMAT PS5 (reviewed), PS4 PRICE £24.99 ETA Out now PUB Tate Multimedia DEV Tate Multimedia PLAYERS 1 LENGTH 5 hrs ACCESSIBILITY Subtitles

With coiled legs, an aggressive streak, and cute ears, kangaroos feel almost engineered by evolution to be the perfect mascot platformer star. Yet, with only a handful of early 'oos releases, the road for Kao hasn't been smooth. This soft reboot puts on a good show, but before the bells clang more than a few problems will make you hopping angry.

Try to compare Kao to other platforming series and you'll come up short. Not because it's a breath of fresh air, but because it feels torn about what it wants to be. The linear nature of each stage suggests it's comfortable being a straightforward level-based affair, but hub worlds have locked gates that you have to collect a certain amount of runes (scattered throughout the levels and hubs) to open. But the runes are far from hidden, almost always just sitting on the beaten path, and there aren't enough levels or runes to really enable you to pick and choose which levels you unlock and do bar one or two. Collectathon elements can be fun (they shine in Spyro, for instance), but here the collecting feels so cursory it's almost pointless.