- 3RD-STRIKE.COM - A La Une - 28/Jul 17:40

Donkey Kong Bananza – Review

It’s been a long time since the old Donkey Kong (now Cranky Kong) was angrily throwing barrels at mustachioed plumbers in arcades. Nonetheless, the series was instantly put on the map and eventually spawned the more adventurous series, Donkey Kong Country, with the current DK in the lead. Outside of the N64 release, the main series games have utilized traditional 2D gameplay and never strayed too far away from the formula that made Donkey Kong Country such a beloved experience. It then came as a surprise that Nintendo decided to give Donkey Kong his own 3D adventure again, one in which he could pretty much destroy everything in sight. We put the game to the test and loved every minute of it. Story Unsure when this Donkey Kong original adventure takes place, but you’ll be playing as the titular Donkey Kong, mining Banandium Gems. It seems as if DK is quite good at his job and enjoys his daily 9-to-5. Even so, not everything is going well, as a sinkhole opens underneath Ingot Isle, dragging the mine and everything in it below the surface. While exploring, you come across a rock-like creature that is aptly named Odd Rock. After a very short time adventuring and exploring together, the duo encounters an elder who is able to restore Odd Rock’s true appearance, that of a young girl by the name of Pauline. The elder instructs the pair to go to the planet’s core to find the Banandium Root, which has the power to grant all wishes. Pauline wants to go back to the surface, while DK has his eyes on the prize as always: Banandium Gems. While it seems like a fun adventure for the two of them, they’ll also have to deal with the dastardly VoidCo.’s president, Void Kong, who is also hellbent on finding the Banandium Root. All in all, the story is presented in a fun way, but it often takes the backseat. You’ll mainly be exploring and destroying your surroundings, with the occasional story sequence in between bigger events. It’s a fun story for young and old, but it does remain rather shallow for the most part. We didn’t mind this, especially since a Donkey Kong game is pretty much always all about the gameplay. Graphics Graphically, Donkey Kong Bananza looks great and is also a great showcase of what the Switch 2 can do. Not only does everything look crisp, but with the amount of destructible parts of the environment, we didn’t even notice any slowdowns when destroying everything in sight. Each biome has a distinct theme and new assets to completely trash. All enemy designs are neat too, and it’s fun to see some new enemies in the DK universe. The young version of Pauline, who we may know as the mayor of New Donky City, is an adorable ‘new’ addition to the cast, and both she and DK can be customized with quite a few different outfits. DK’s transformations for the Bananza sequences look cool, and they come with nice visual effects. We mainly played the game in docked mode, where we enjoyed a steady frame rate and good-looking visuals. In handheld mode, things do look a bit more impressive due to the scaling, and performance was great here as well. The game does suffer from a few very awkward camera angles at times. Sound Donkey Kong Bananza’s sound design is truly impressive for the most part. You’ll be accompanied by an amazing soundtrack that also includes some iconic classic Donkey Kong tunes from older titles. A particular highlight here is the tracks that play when DK is in one of his Bananza transformations. These songs are catchy, upbeat, and get the adrenaline flowing. The sound effects also pack a solid punch, and it’s simply satisfying hearing DK tear the place down. We had mixed feelings about the voice acting, however. Only Pauline has actual voice-acted speech, and it was simply lovely hearing this young version of Pauline come to life. So far, we have only seen her all grown up in titles such as Super Mario Odyssey and Mario Golf: Super Rush, to name a few. She has an impressive amount of spoken dialogue, which you can listen to when you rest up in the different houses that you can build. All other characters sadly only communicate via gibberish. We feel this is a missed opportunity, especially with a lot of characters receiving fully voice-acted appearances in the recent The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Gameplay Donkey Kong Bananza is equal parts action-adventure and platformer. After falling into the recently opened-up sinkhole, you’ll go from one floor to the next, collecting Banandium Gems, destroying everything in sight, and completing puzzles and challenges as you make your way through the game’s story. The offset is simple, and the actual gameplay loop is oh-so satisfying. The game does give you the option to run around and figure out your own way as to where you should go next, or to have handy markers showing you where the next objective is. We personally enjoyed turning on the objective markers. Even though we stated that the game is both an action-adventure title and a platformer, it also has so many collect-a-thon elements. The latter is fairly optional for the most part, as you don’t need to find all Banandium Gems to unlock every single upgrade, and the many fossils scattered around in every biome will only grant you outfit upgrades for DK and Pauline. These costumes do give passive bonuses, but more often than not, you’ll encounter enough fossils without going out of your way to unlock one or two beneficial outfits. Much like we were spamming Revelio in Hogwarts Legacy, we were using DK’s sonar by clapping his hands together. This revealed hidden objects nearby, allowing us to figure out puzzles to reach Banandium Gems, fossils, etc. Most of the items were also reachable by brute-forcing our way through terrain, which proved to be satisfying every single time. We found Donkey Kong Bananza to be a fairly accessible game, as the overall difficulty level felt rather low. If you spend some points on upgrading your punching power and your sonar, you’re already halfway there. Bosses were impressive and had neat designs, but more often than not, we could simply smash them to pieces with our Bananza transformation(s). We didn’t mind the overall low difficulty of the experience, as we enjoyed exploring and solving puzzles so much that we often postponed beating bosses anyway. This is a great game for both experienced gamers and those who are fairly new to titles such as this. The controls are also quite intuitive, which is always a plus for a 3D platforming experience. Conclusion Donkey Kong Bananza is an amazing new Donkey Kong title that pushes the Switch 2’s early games lineup in the right direction. While Mario Kart World and Welcome Tour proved to be very nice release titles, we were hoping for a bit more Nintendo content on their brand-new console. Donkey Kong Bananza solves this issue, as we absolutely enjoyed everything it threw at us with its interesting exploration, satisfying destruction mechanics, cool characters, upbeat soundtrack, and, of course, Donkey Kong’s spiffy new look and updated visuals for a proper next-gen experience. While Donkey Kong Bananza strays far away from the traditional 2D format of the series, it’s an absolute blast to play through, and it’s a very worthy DK successor.