Donkey Kong Bananza Review | TheSixthAxis
Donkey Kong Bananza is a smashing good time. With Pauline clutching onto the fur on his back as the pair race to the centre of the world, you’ll be rampaging across the landscape of each level, slapping rock-encased enemies around, and dig-punching yourself in a gluttonous frenzy of screen-filling button mashing as you search for the moreish bananas that DK goes ga-ga for.
It’s been an awfully long time since the last Donkey Kong 3D platformer – he literally only had Rare’s Donkey Kong 64 collectathon to his name – and gaming tech has moved on such that this is a completely different feeling game. Having experimented lightly with voxel deformation in Super Mario Odyssey, Nintendo EPD Tokyo has now made this a core part of Donkey Kong Bananza, changing everything from how the world appears visually, to how DK can get around, and how you can transform the levels just by smashing stuff.
It’s utterly rambunctious stuff, letting you punch and smash through the world and enemies alike. You’ll feel a bit naughty as you do so. Should I really just be cutting a straight line to the banana-shaped sonar pulse? Isn’t there a hardworking level designer in Japan who’s shedding a tear because I’m ignoring the carefully designed, visually signposted path through to the next story beat? Am I not “breaking” the game by clipping the camera through the world and then filling the screen with shards of rock, gold, and glass as I hammer the punch and jump buttons?
In truth, this must be exactly what Nintendo intends. Arguably, just as with the chaotic messiness of Mario Kart World’s larger world and races, there’s some key areas here where Nintendo is giving in and accepting that this is just going to be a messier style of platformer. They’ve designed around that, ramping up the dopamine hits with more regular collectable Banandium Gems to find, more upgrades and costumes to unlock, more opportunities to branch off for another punch-filled frenzy, another challenge level, before returning to the main path and getting distracted again two seconds later. As intentional as this is, you can easily get lost in the underground button-mashing, the camera flipping back and forth between obscuring the world outside with a foggy haze and revealing it with a no clip-like view, and the tunnelling becoming overwhelming until you stop, take a breath and try to figure out how to get back outside.
As indulgent as the digging and deformation can be, DK still plays with all the natural, effortless control that you’d expect from a Nintendo platformer, it’s just that instead of that coming in the form of triple jumps, hat twirls and dives, DK’s movement is more about lumbering in a chosen direction, no matter what’s in the way. He can just clamber up vertical surfaces with ease, getting up and over in fast and fluid fashion, even if he’s holding a big chunk of rock in his hands, unless there’s spiked vines, lava or something slippery that he can’t grip onto. Add to that forward tumbles, unlockable skills like double jumping off a rock, and there’s a good deal of core 3D platforming to master.
And then there’s the Bananza transformations. Learned from the towering Elders that lead each underground animal tribe, Bananza transformations give DK big and bold new abilities. It starts with Kong Bananza, who’s basically just a bigger and smashier version of DK, but you quickly get Zebra Bananza for speedy running across soft surfaces other forms fall through, Ostrich Bananza who can glide and drop egg bombs, and goes on from there. Kong Bananza is the go-to form for much of the game, almost universally appropriate in combat, for souped up digging and when you need to get a bit meaner. The other forms are often better suited to areas and challenges designed specifically for them, and I rarely used them outside of that. Yes, the Zebra’s faster, but since I’ll need to recharge the Bananza meter once I’ve used this form for a bit, I might as well just rock surf or take a few extra moments to get where I’m going.
And where we’re going is deep down to the planet’s core in a race against the Void Crew. A trio of devious Kongs, they crash DK’s own mining operation down to a sublevel of the world, inadvertently pairing him up with what turns out to be a younger version of Pauline, whose powerful singing is what transforms DK each time. She’s the only English-speaking character in the tale, though her Bananza songs are gibberish and sound like a cross between Splatoon and Patapon’s Fever song. She’s a great addition, though, and there’s great camaraderie between her and DK. Sure, her motivations are still pretty basic, but she adds a lot of heart to the tale when DK’s head is just filled with dreams about bananas.
She’s also there to provide the co-op mode, handing her shouting and control over transformations to a second person, whether locally using pointing or mouse mode, a second switch with GameShare, or online via GameChat. We’ve only tried out the same-console co-op. Her shouting manifests itself as rocks, but can also absorb other materials, and this works really nicely to support the main player. It’s an experience that lands somewhere between the co-op modes of Super Mario Galaxy and Odyssey. Joy-Con 2 mouse controls also get a workout in the sculpting DK Artist mode available from the main menu, sculpting and painting.
As the pair journey on, heading to the planet’s core to have their dreams made true, they find that the Void Crew has cursed each level with some kind of plight, leaving impediments and enemies to get in your way. Combat brings us back to that almost mindless bludgeoning. Most enemies have got an outer shell made of one of the world materials, and this really highlights some of their interactions.
DK can easily clobber his way through soft sand to get to a golden enemy skeleton inside, but it will take a bit more hitting to get through stone – which means you need to watch for attack timing. But if it’s concrete, nasty spiky vines, or even lava, you need a different approach, ripping up chunks of harder materials out of the ground, throwing rocks or even explosive materials at them to bust through their armour. While that changes how you approach them, Donkey Kong Bananza does lean pretty heavily on these material variants of half a dozen basic enemy types. It does get a bit repetitive in that regard.
You also feel that with the boss battles. Some are just straight up punchathons that can last moments in a flurry of Kong Bananza’s fists, while others have a more traditional three-part structure, or are best tackled with a particular Bananza form. But you’ll face most of them two or three times as you work down the world’s levels, and I think that’s part of why a portion of the game’s final third felt a bit stretched out to me, in addition to the kind of obliged need to make more use of certain Bananza powers. That said, it builds up to a fantastically enjoyable finale.
On the whole, the game’s pacing and variety is great. For the more traditional stages, you start off at a round 100th level, reach a village or meet an Elder, and then branch off to tackle objectives that can take you one or two sublevels below, changing the tone, adding more challenge and variety as you go. But that’s not true of every layer, and there’s some great change of pace moments and environments that are wholly unexpected, beyond the variety of mini challenges that you find around each world. And did you say cameos? Yeah, there’s a few of those too.
