Kao the Kangaroo: Mystery of the Volcano (2005 re-release) Reviews

4 orbs missing

I LOVE THIS GAME BUT CAN DOMEBODY HELP KAOS NOSE IS ON A SIDE BUGGED AND THE TENT IS BLACK.

That tron tunnel race thing is a big nope from me.

"Kao the Kangaroo: Mystery of the Volcano (2005 re-release)" is an ancient game from 2005. It's a whopping 20 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions (or widescreen monitors), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware. This third person platformer/adventure game is the third in a series of games designed for ancient consoles like the Dreamcast and GameCube, although this installment was exclusive to PC... it's not clear what was going through the heads of the Polish console developers behind this move, but whatever they were thinking, they were wrong. This series is a very poor "me too" attempt to get some money for the burgeoning "Consoles, but with 3D graphics!" movement of the early turn of the century games industry, and it didn't do too well for obvious reasons. You may notice the release date for the game is 2023, but I must stress that ZERO apparent updates, modifications or anything else simple have not been done; The game does not work on modern PCs. Let's go into the standard reasons why games like this are not worth your time. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. It's apparent that little to no testing for the game was done, at least on modern gaming PCs. In fullscreen, the game doesn't display properly, with the game area drawn outside the viewable space. This is caused by the developer not bothering to ensure the game works on resolutions over 1080p, with very high resolution monitors that use resolution scaling. Because the game area is not drawn correctly, it doesn't map to the mouse pointer properly, so the game itself simply cannot be played. Gamers shouldn't be forced to accept defective products just because developers don't bother with basic testing on PC. This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam? "Kao the Kangaroo: Mystery of the Volcano (2005 re-release)" is relatively expensive for a broken abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $2 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.