While it’s the season of many games coming out on all platforms, we’ve taken the time to dive into Kukoos: Lost Pets from developer Petit Fabrik. It was originally released on December 14th, 2021 on Steam and has now been ported to Xbox, PS4, and Nintendo Switch. With the new ports coming out it’s our turn to look at these Fall Guys look-alikes and see what they have to offer!
The Kukoos are stout but wide little characters that live on the island of an ocean planet. They look quite similar to the characters from Fall Guys but more advanced as they are able to speak and own pets. Your job is to control a Kukoo and help save the pets that are running rampant throughout the various worlds you can access. But is this game a fun platformer with interesting pets, or does the game just feel a bit unfinished? Let’s take a look.
The Story
The story of this game…exists. The game opens with an explanation of the water-covered world the Kukoos inhabit and the tree with the doors to other worlds. Then you start a game, pick a character, and go right into some race the Kukoos are having with their pets by their side. This functions as a tutorial teaching you how to use the pets.
Then some squid-looking Kukoo comes up with his robot frog pet and gets the best time. Someone is giving these robot helmet things after the race to help your pets obey you better, but they make all of the pets rebel against their owners. After that, it is up to you, with a little guidance from the grandma of all Kukoos, Gramma, to save all of the pets across the different worlds.
That is what you get as you are sent out into the worlds saving the pets that have been brainwashed by the helmets. The story try’s at the beginning of the game but ends up falling off throughout the adventure, only to pickup at the end. During the playthrough the story seems to be almost nonexistent. You fight sea creatures as world bosses, but you don’t know why and it leaves more questions than answers.
By the end of the game you can sort of out together what’s going on, but not enough background our setup is given to really make it feel more impactful. The story just seems a bit hollow and the dry delivery of some of the talking lines makes it hard to follow at times. This game would have benefited from either a little more setup or some better explanations throughout the playthrough.
Graphics
Though this is a colorful and stylized game like Fall Guys, in our playthrough we found quite a bit of graphical issues. None of them are really game-breaking, but they definitely take away from the overall experience.
Most of the issues with the graphics either tend to come with loading into a new highly populated map or with certain textures just missing. The large city world suffers from terrible graphics while trying to load the world in for a solid few seconds along with an awkward “white ocean”. Not sure if the ocean area of the city levels is supposed to be white but it is just off-putting.
Besides the white water of the city, at least a few textures, including an entire floor, were missing during our playthrough of the ancient/Aztec-inspired world. While the game is quite bright and colorful there are some pretty noticeable graphical issues.
Controls
We played this on the Nintendo Switch, but most controllers probably handle the game equally. Two of the right-hand face buttons are for jumping, the other two are for diving. The ‘R’ button is to bring out your pet. The ‘ZR’ is to use the pet’s ability sometimes, and the left stick controls movement. The camera is locked and follows at certain angles around the player on what seems like a rail system.
The controls are shown off while doing the tutorials and the first time you encounter a specific need, but honestly, this was executed poorly in the tutorial. You are told to use your wing pet to fly by tapping jump extra times but the game never tells you that you have to activate your pet with ‘R’ first. This led to confusion until button mashing brought out the pet to use the ability. There are multiple areas in the game like this that only tell you part of what you have to do, only to have you figure the rest out and sometimes tell you later.
Control Bugs
The controls can also sometimes lead to weird gameplay glitches that are not fully understood yet. In some instances, your abilities restrictions just stop working as intended and you have no way to defend yourself against enemies. In general, the abilities you get from the pets you save also tend to restrict the players more than they help; this ultimately takes away from gameplay.
The camera is locked on a rail system, following the player works most of the time but sometimes hinders the gameplay with wild shifts when you least expect it. Be prepared to sometimes jump off the map because the camera suddenly spins around you and you rocket off the edge. The scenery can also get in the way at times with the locked camera leading to unnecessary damage.
Audio
Kukoos: Lost Pets has very fun and quirky music to go along with the colorful aesthetic of the game. Bright scenery and bubbly/bouncy music work really well together when you can hear it. The voice acting in cut scenes is decently executed with subtitles if you can’t exactly understand the accent the characters talk in.
This game suffers from often fluctuating audio levels that tend to change in-between loading areas. Sometimes the music is too soft to hear, but sometimes it is so loud that voice lines get drowned out. At times, voice lines even get out of sync from the cutscenes themselves leading to confusion about what is happening on screen. Sometimes during boss battles, there is no music to even listen to.
It is unclear if most of these issues are just from the Switch not running properly or the game being poorly optimized to run on the Switch. For a game almost a year old though, there was more than enough time to get the audio sounding correct.
Replayability
This is a platforming game, or at least it wants to be. As such, there really isn’t any form of replayability to this game. After the credits, Gramma does tell you that you can make your way back through and 100% complete the game, but the infuriating controls and floaty gameplay make it hard to want to accomplish that. There may be something after that 100% completion but someone stronger than us will have to try and make that happen.
The Verdict
Kukoos: Lost Pets is a pretty great idea that suffers from graphical bugs, bad and floaty controls, an infuriating camera, pet abilities that hinder the player, and audio issues out of the wazoo. Seeing as how the game was released almost a year ago on Steam, many of these issues should have been ironed out during the process of porting this game to the Nintendo Switch.
There are many other games out there that could suffice as more entertaining and less frustrating platformers So we suggest passing on this game. But if you would like to see a full playthrough you can check out AlanEight’s playthrough on YouTube and see for yourself!
This game was provided by the developer for review purposes.
