Release: 2018
Developer: Retro Studios
Publisher: Nintendo
Gameplay Stats: Game completed! Switch game, so who knows how long it took
Aesthetics: This game looks and sounds great! The enemies and environments are all interesting and playful. Sometimes my impatience or nerves caused me to die, but the environment would change in a way that made sense if I wasn't in a hurry. The movement all looks good! The hitboxes are good but not great, there were a couple times where it looked like I dodged an attack or made a jump where that wasn't the case. The music though! David Wise continues to kill it. All of the music here is so good. Each world had a specific theme and lots of the tracks had echoes of similar songs from earlier in the series. The sounds from the Kongs got a little annoying but they weren't distracting.
Plot: Wouldn't ya know it, someone took Donkey Kong's bananas again and he needs to run around all the archipelago to kick them out and get back to chilling. I can't imagine this is why anyone was here and it wasn't really treated as much more than a McGuffin. The few cutscenes that were included as intros to boss fights were pretty cute and enjoyable. They were also pretty short for the most part and didn't overstay their welcome.
Gameplay: All the typical DKC stuff here! Not much was revolutionary from what I remember of Donkey Kong Country Returns. Plenty of mine carts, some swimming, and a whole lot of platforming. I don't really like controlling Donkey, I think he is the most sluggish of the Kongs. I miss being able to swap between playable characters in the first entries in the series. I very distinctly remember playing through the original DKC as Diddy most of the time because he was faster and more fluid to control. Returning some of that speed would've been nice. I have some small gripes with the controls as well. The roll and the ground pound were on the same button which caused me to die several times. I would land on a small platform with a background element that would interact with the ground pound and accidentally hurl myself into the abyss instead of doing the intended interaction. My experience was largely good apart from those gripes.
Overall I enjoyed this game but it seemed like more of the same to me. I didn't really feel like it did enough that was unique. The settings and levels were interesting but the rest of it felt kind of same-y. It may have been too long since I played the previous entry in the series, but there wasn't much here that made it feel particularly fresh to me. Very solid game overall, just nothing outstanding in my opinion.
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