Donkey Kong Bananza - Going Ape
Donkey Kong Bananza, the Donkey Kong series’ first 3D entry since Donkey Kong 64, promises a freedom unlike DK’s usual fare. Made by the team behind Super Mario Odyssey, the Nintendo Switch 2’s first big Nintendo adventure puts the big, goofy, gorilla into a new and highly destructible environment, and lets him loose with those big ol’ fists to both wreak havoc on the world, and ultimately (try to) save the world from a greedy yet fabulous gallery of villains. What results is an open world that can be pulled to pieces in whatever way you choose – a key feature which is both the game’s biggest strength and its biggest weakness.
Donkey Kong begins the game as a miner, toiling away in the caves on Ingot Isle in a gold rush-style pursuit of Banandium Gems. As an absolute slave to his love of bananas, this feels like the perfect career-choice for Donkey Kong, who it’s immediately clear is surely too good at his job. He’s extremely motivated, and also seems to require absolutely no tools to do ten times the amount of work his monkey colleagues can do in half the time due to his ability to simply punch through the earth and reveal hidden secrets. This economy seems flawed, but that’s a topic for a different article.
When a storm sweeps Donkey Kong and his entire cohort of much smaller colleagues further underground, he soon stumbles upon a small, strange rock – initially known as ‘Odd Rock’, and decides that it’s friend-shaped enough to join him on his quest for more bananas. It isn’t long before the rock reveals itself to be a young girl named Pauline, who has been trapped underground but longs to return to the surface – and she can’t do it without DK’s help. It’s honestly a little devastating when the rock turns into Pauline – the rock is extremely cute, but Pauline does have her own charms.
Pauline, whose singing can unlock new areas of the world and remove problematic void substances from the planet’s lower layers, soon proves that her voice has another use. When combined with Donkey Kong’s chest-thumping beat, she gives DK the ability to shift into a variety of animal forms for a limited amount of time, each with its own uses. By using these forms, and also – and I stress, primarily – his fists, DK can uncover new pathways through the world, collecting Banandium Gems and completing challenges on the duo’s quest to reach the planet’s core.
But while those forms can occasionally be fun, for the most part, problems can be solved by punching. Not sure how to get around an obstacle to get to your next destination? Punch through it. See an object in the distance that you desire? Punch to it. Got a boss you want to take down without thinking about it? Get out those fists. While the game presents you with a host of mechanics with which to tackle challenges, the thing that disappointed me about this game is that I almost never needed to use them. I liked punching – it’s fun to wreak absolute havoc through the world around you, and when you don’t want to have to think too hard, it’s nice that you can just hit on through – but I also wanted the game to allow me to do less of that.
When you first acquire a new form, you’re usually presented with an environment to traverse that requires you to use it – and those moments are fun. The first one you’ll learn makes DK into a big Kong that just punches really hard, and that extra-hard punch machine is able to punch through otherwise indestructible materials, and take down extra tough enemies. Transforming requires the use of ‘Bananergy’ – a metre built up by doing things like destroying terrain, or collecting gold, so you’re limited in how long you can remain in these forms, but Bananergy is so easy to build up that you aren’t really limited if you find yourself particularly enamoured by a specific ability. The bird ability, for example, allows you to glide over gaps, and can be useful for quick traversal. The zebra moves quickly and is light-footed over otherwise delicate terrain, and I’m sure will be the future delight of many speedrunners. These forms are fun to use.
But it’s just so rare that you ever need them. On more than one occasion, I was given a form and then immediately thrust into a boss fight, where I could see that the game wanted me to make use of my new skill. Using that skill, however, would have taken Bananergy, and time, and a certain amount of finesse when it came to execution – so instead I just punched. And it worked. And I wish it hadn’t.
This is also the problem with finding Banandium Gems in the world. Because I’m a completionist, the second I saw a Banandium Gem in the wild, I started punching towards it – and that would usually just get me straight there. I’d then obtain the gem, see its name, and realise there was actually a much funner intended way to get there – but the game hadn’t flagged it. By making the world so open, it also makes itself vulnerable to making you feel directionless. It’ll tell you where to go if you follow a direct path through the levels, but doing that means you’ll miss out on so much content found by exploring, or find yourself accidentally skipping steps or puzzles. Once you start exploring, the game seems to think you don’t want any guard rails at all, and leaves you to punch your way to success.
I want to stress again – the punching is fun. The game provides you with an almost constant stream of dopamine, rewarding you with huge amounts of gold or other collectibles with every bit of terrain you destroy. You can get into a flow state just punching a completely useless path through a layer of the world that will be ultimately pointless but still feel like a great use of time. My brain, for most of this game, was absolutely buzzing. You can also make an even easier, stress-free experience by inviting a co-op partner along for the ride, who can take control of Pauline and shoot at things for you – it’s a fairly passive experience, but does allow the game to be enjoyed with a friend (or a parent, who may want to help out their small child otherwise struggling with the tougher moments).
But there are also moments of frustration. There are difficulty spikes that can feel deeply unfair, especially when the game is otherwise happy to let you breeze through it. The way the terrain is destructible means that sometimes you’ll try to throw a punch, or a section of rock, and you’ll be blocked by a floating bit of terrain that you didn’t know you’d missed out on removing. If you dig too deep, or too low, or in too strange a place, sometimes the camera will just lose you completely. These moments are the minority, but they’re frequent enough to take away from the magic of what the game is trying to do – and what it’s trying to do is extremely charming.
DK and Pauline make an odd pair, but their relationship is endearing from the get-go. Donkey Kong is a simple boy whose only thought is ‘banana’ – and it’s nice to see him add a second, ‘Pauline’ thought to the mix. Though DK is a simple and mostly silent hero, his relationship with Pauline is expressed surprisingly well through the game’s smaller moments, like idle animations that show her bothering him by playing with his fur, or rest stop conversations that show the 13 year old Pauline talking to DK as if it’s 3am at a sleepover. These rest stops are designed to allow you to replenish your health, but I found myself using every new one I uncovered even if I didn’t need it, just to hear these conversations play out. You can also give them matching outfits themed to each level, which obviously help to show their BFF status.
There are also plenty of nods in here for fans of the series, and those who are deep in Donkey Kong lore will find much to discuss throughout the DNA of Donkey Kong Bananza. Some levels feature 2D platforming sections that are clear throwbacks to Donkey Kong Country, and outside of that, you’ll encounter some familiar faces throughout DK and Pauline’s underground journey. It’s clear that those involved in this game’s creation had a lot of love for the series – and honestly, it makes me wish I’d played more Donkey Kong games as a kid.
Overall, Donkey Kong Bananza mostly achieves what it sets out to do. It’s a sandbox-ish open world game that lets you play it the way you want to – but largely at the expense of many of the things that could make it a little more special. I hope this is the beginning of new things for Donkey Kong, as Nintendo seem to want it to be. But I also sort of hope that as fun as it is, on DK’s next journey, Nintendo let me solve fewer things by just punching away my problems.
Player 2 reviewed Donkey Kong Bananza on Nintendo Switch 2, using a code kindly provided by Nintendo.
