Review: Kahoots

Posted by Chris K on December 20th, 2009 | 0 Comments | Tags: kahoots

Last week I was on vacation and I had a fairly long car ride to sit through. Luckily I had my PSP with me and a bunch of minis to try out. The first of which was Kahoots.

Kahoots is a fairly simple game to play. You don’t have direct control of your player, so you don’t have to worry about that, but you do have control over most of the platforms on screen. There are a few special platforms (a jump platform, a reverse platform, a trap door platform, etc.) which you use to get Kahoots to the door that is placed somewhere in the stage. The game is very good at teaching you how to play, each time a new item or platform is added the game will let you know how to use it on the loading screen. There is only one game mode, but I didn’t really expect more from a Minis title.

I was very happy that all the stages are unlocked from the beginning of the game. If I got stuck at one, I just skipped it and would come back later. I feel that the levels scale in difficulty really well. I didn’t really start having a problem finishing levels in one try until about halfway through the game. There are two ways to clear a level, the first being just getting to the door. The second way to clear a level is to get all the cupcakes in a stage and then getting to the door. Later in the game it will take you a few tries to figure out what you need to do in order to accomplish this. Going back and playing levels also has one other benefit… trophies. The game features 10 or so”in-game trophies” which definitely help add some replayability to this title. Most of these can be had by just playing through the game normally.

If there was one thing that I would say that I wasn’t feeling, it would have to be the controls. I felt that I was fighting them at times just to move platforms around. I think that if you could move platforms around while the game was “paused” (holding the L button down) it would have made the game’s controls far more accessible. It also seemed at times that there would be a lag when inputting with the d-pad. If the “pause” move was a toggle rather than a hold, it might have also alleviated the problems I had with the controls. They do some things that I like though, mostly the ability to speed up time with the R button.

Kahoots brings two things together that I love; platforming and puzzles. Sadly this blend of platforms and puzzles is fairly average. This is not to say that it is bad, you will definitely get your money’s worth, but I was just hoping for more.

For more info on our review policy click here. This review is for the PlayStation Portable version of the game.