Kao the Kangaroo: Bend the Roo’les DLC Review: Bringing Crash Bandicoot Energy to the Adventure

After reading my first review of Kao the Kangaroo, you may be wondering why I would return for seconds with the latest Bend the Roo’les DLC, which is a fair question. Part of the reason is that my issue with the Switch version eventually got patched, so I was curious to play the game on PC and see how it fared there. Another reason is that I’m a hopeless platformer addict. Growing up in an NES household is the primary reason, along with a particular plumber. But I also played lots of other platformers over the years, including the well-known Crash Bandicoot. I fondly remembered that adventure, up until I played it again as an adult. Wherein all the various balance issues became painfully apparent. This brings us to the latest Kao the Kangaroo adventure, Bend the Roo’les.

Back to Hopalloo Island

Bend the Roo’les takes place pretty much immediately after the resolution of the original game. The day has been saved, the not-so-hidden menace behind all the chaos has been dealt with, and Kao’s sister has been rescued, just in time for the Eternal World to make a comeback. Corrupted crystals start covering Hopalloo Island, and a particularly ornery crab gets upgraded to the massive Crab King! Throw in an NPC kangaroo getting kidnapped, and that’s about all the story you need for another adventure.

This DLC is split between five levels and ends with an impressive boss fight against the cranky old crab. While I was initially disappointed that the entirety of the experience takes place just on Hopalloo, it’s a pretty substantial amount of content. Each of the five stages is massive, split between multiple sections and expressing a different theme. The first one is an idyllic waterfall lair, and the next one is split between fire and ice, the third one is an airborne monastery, and so on. It all sounds terrific on paper, but execution is where the truth is unfortunately revealed.

Testing My Patience

Now, while it’s true I love platformers in general, here’s another truth – I HATE time trials. I get anxious when I am fighting the clock, especially when failure to meet a set time results in failure, forcing me to try again, which is why I’m so frustrated that Bend the Roo’les decided to add mandatory time trial sections all over the levels. You’ll punch the clock and then have mere seconds to get to the flagged area, which is usually pretty far away and littered with traps. Worse, each level is full of instant death pits, be they drowning in water, melting in lava, or screaming as you fall hundreds of feet off a mountain.

To add insult to injury, many of these sections are also full of enemies that will snipe you from a distance. Some will even pop up right in your face to throw you off, like giant spiders or puffer fish that spit homing fireballs at poor Kao. Now, in fairness, there’s other sections in the stages, and I rather enjoyed most of the puzzle-solving. It’s just that these admittedly large levels also feel much more linear than the base game, and really force you to take one path from start to finish with very few side paths.

Lovely Lava

Another issue with Bend the Roo’les, which I’m not very forgiving about, is all the cardinal sins the game commits. I’m all about clarity and a well-defined sense of what to expect in platformers. So imagine my surprise when I was platforming across a volcano, only to realize the game hadn’t warned me that the lava will eventually rise up unexpectedly. And while there are plenty of checkpoints littered across each level, it’s more than a little annoying that dying will force you back to the very beginning of each stage. Given the number of time trials and the sheer length of the levels, I was hoping they’d have mercy and allow me to continue after dying from my most recent checkpoint. Sadly, that’s not the case.

One thing I do appreciate here is that Bend the Roo’les gives you a reason to collect all those blue diamonds. Now you can trade them in for concept art in the HUB shop, which is a nice touch. What’s less helpful is that you can only do this in the Bend the Roo’les DLC. It would have been nice for this to be added to the base game as well. Also, you may notice that Hopalloo Island is covered in coins. There’s a good reason – any health extensions you may have acquired in the original game don’t transfer over to the DLC. So it’s in your best interest to load up and buy more health here. One heart fragment costs 500 coins, so it’ll take 2000 to add another heart to your overall health. Trust me that you’ll very much want to invest in more health as soon as possible. Though the DLC can technically be beaten in a few hours, I spent a lot more due to the number of cheap deaths I suffered.

I will say, I appreciated the Crab King boss fight at the end of the experience. He’s large and in charge, and pretty epic. Much like the rest of the DLC, he’s enormous, and assaults you with lasers, crystals, and shockwaves aplenty. That said, it would have been nice if he wasn’t the only boss available, since the main game had several to contend with. But I understand the developers probably wanted to focus on one new threat instead of several.

Crystal Clear

Visually, this is still pretty much what fans of the original game will expect. There’s not much in the way of new bells or whistles, just more of the same. The only exception is there are a lot more corrupted crystals. As for the sound design, it’s also unchanged. I was hoping for some hot new track to motivate me, but it’s the same lowkey adventure music.

Although Bend the Roo’les avoids the infuriating save glitch I encountered in the Switch version, it has its own problems. Namely, the game is still pretty buggy. For example, in the volcanic peaks level, I got flung from a trap up above a doorway. From there, I was trapped and unable to get back down. I also had several times I was just trying to climb up a wooden ladder and fell to my death instead, seemingly for no good reason. Lastly, there were times I tried to activate an elemental ability only to use the one I didn’t need.

Jumps A Little Farther

While it’s true that Bend the Roo’les is a pretty affordable experience and one that’s easier to recommend, it still has its share of problems, both in terms of glitches and bugs, but also in terms of unbalanced game design. But if you still want to take your chances and spend more time in the Kao the Kangaroo universe, you might still find some limited enjoyment here.

Final Verdict: 3/5

Available on: PC (reviewed), Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Series X|S; Publisher: Tate Multimedia; Developer: Mataboo; Players: 1; Released: May 4, 2023; MSRP: $7.99

Editor’s note: The publisher provided a review copy to Hey Poor Player.