The early years of the NES gave us many games that tried to replicate the success of Super Mario Bros. Some were quite successful, like the Adventure Island series. Many were failures or disappointments too, like the game I'm about to review. Kid Kool and the Quest For the Seven Wonder Herbs tasks you with travelling across several worlds to find the wonder herbs needed to create a potion to save an ailing king. There's no way to sugar coat it, this game is a mess. Lets dig into this steaming pile of gaming excrement and see why its such a disappointment.

Gameplay

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Kid Kool commits multiple gameplay sins that render it a chore to play. The first thing you'll notice is that the titular character has two speeds, tortoise and hare. Remember what its like trying to walk Sonic the Hedgehog up a ramp? That's how it feels to get this guy moving. Once he's started though, he sprints across the screen way too fast.

These both create huge problems. First of all, this is a one-hit-death game (unless you have a your weapon to absorb a hit) and you simply don't have enough time to react to enemies when your character runs so fast. Secondly, there's a lot of platforming that requires you to have enough momentum to make a long jump. When Kid Kool takes so long to get moving, short platforms just don't have enough room for him to get enough speed to make those jumps.

You can acquire a weapon in the form of a small critter you can throw, and he returns to you after each toss. In addition, he allows you to take an extra hit before dying. Though there's no clear indication of where you find the creature. It shows up early in the game when you run by a bush, but if you don't have enough speed it does't appear. Otherwise, your only method of attack is the typical head stomp.

Additional gameplay problems include screens that scroll vertically by pausing the game to shift the whole screen up or down, secret items hidden in places that kill you when you bump into them and enemies that are placed in places that are hard to avoid when you're blinding falling, running or jumping.

Presentation

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The game features bright and colorful graphics, though sometimes they're a bit on the muted side of the NES palette for a game that should be saturated and vibrant. Animation on your character and enemies is acceptible and sprite work is pretty basic. Some of the backgrounds have some effort put into them, but none come close to being impressive.

Music and sound is also low-effort, with bland forgettable themes and generic sound effects. It seems like the audio was built from bits and pieces from other games rather than building something special and unique for Kid Kool.

Verdict

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Kid Kool is a culmination of many problems inherent in games of the era all wrapped up in a single package. Major problems can be overlooked if a game is still fun to play, like the deeply flawed but still fun Friday the 13th game on the NES. However Kid Kool simply isn't fun to play.

When a game feels like work to slog through, its failed at its primary purpose -- to entertain. This game will be going back on my shelf and likely never plugged in ever again. Only games that are completely broken will score lower on my scale than Kid Kool.

Score 1/10

Thanks for reading. As always, upvotes, resteems and comments are appreciated!