Review – Donkey Kong Country Returns
Nostalgia is a powerful weapon for any developer to wield. The ultimate double-sided armament embracing it too much can lead to a game feeling dated, see Bionic Commando Re:Armed, while changing everything bar the name will have fans hungry for the developers flesh, see Bionic Commando (of course it helps if the game is actually good in the first place).
In the majority of situations the price of nostalgia seems to be a dip in quality, a trend that has been sighted so often over the past few years that many inner children have been murdered at the hands of greedy publishers who want to use classic names to make a few bob off of new, uneducated gamers.
Fortunately for Donkey Kong Country Returns, its developers Retro Studios are well versed in the appropriate use of nostalgia.
Creators of the sublime Metroid Prime and its good follow ups, Retro know a thing or two about staying true to a franchise’s spirit whilst trail blazing in important ways. Country Returns may not roll into a morph ball and power bomb its franchise like Samus’ 3D adventure shooter did in 2002, but it’s still an incredibly polished platformer that proves the genre’s big budget validity in the modern console market and reminds us why bananas, mine carts, and Diddy Kong are all still a lot of fun today.
OLD APE
Plot has never been the ape’s strong suit, so in this sense the game remains faithful. An unexpected volcanic explosion causes an army of ancient evil voodoo masks, called the Tiki Tak tribe, to emerge and attack Donkey Kong Island by hypnotizing its indigenous life forms and commanding them to steal the titular gorilla’s precious banana horde. You’d think he’d have got some insurance on them by now.
While this is the fourth game in the Donkey Kong Country series, this is only the second time DK himself has been the star, and it’s all the better for it with nary a duff character in sight. Indeed Retro’s take on the franchises art style is magnificently cohesive, aside from the strange glasses wearing pigs. It may lack the wow factor of Country 1-3’s early Polygon designs but Retro’s approach is simple, bold, colourful, and appealingly cute.
This visual splendor extends to the levels themselves, full of huge camera sweeps, into/out of the screen trickery, from lush green jungles to dripping purple caves the levels bleed character with some scenes being visually impressive irregardless of the Wii’s lacking grunt.
The gameplay, too, is varied with each level finding a unique hook. From a setting amber sun that casts the environment in shadow, to the legendary mine cart stages reinvented with new technology, and even having Kong latch on to gigantic swinging houses, the game finds new ways to iterate on its own ideas constantly as it slowly reinvents its mechanics from level 1-1 right to its final hidden stages.
NEW TRICKS
Retro weren’t happy with great visuals and great ideas mind, they’ve even successfully iterated on the franchises classic ideas to give Kong a more individual personality to help stack against any claims of him being simply a Mario skin.
Diddy is no longer a simple extra life; he’s a fully controllable character by a second player. When you’re not roping loved ones into chimp duties however he becomes a more traditional powerup, freeing him from one of the many DK barrels in any stage gives you an infinite roll ability, two extra hits, and a jetpack to slow your fall, making Diddy to DK like a mushroom to Mario.
The second alteration to the formula is the addition of a grab button, as is the fashion for platformers that shun the more obvious acrobatic approach of wall jumps. DK can now grab moss-covered walls and latch onto vines, saying it as such undersells the importance of this mechanic as it feels very natural to do as the lumbering ape and there are some satisfying gameplay repercussions of the characters new latch happy antics.
Other alterations to the template come as less savory news. The removal of underwater levels and the majority of the animal buddy cast is disappointing, while only being able to play with ‘shake the remote to roll/ground slam/blow’ controls will irk players suffering an early onset of RSI, even if it is responsive and feels great to do.
Bosses are another disappointing area, while all fun to fight they lack the grandeur spectacle and intelligence that the gaming public has come to expect from Retro. Every boss fight in the game is fun, there’s no doubt about that, there’s just a lack of bombast to them, especially disappointing after some of the scenes within the levels themselves do such a good job of enthralling you through a sheer sense of scale.
Oh and the Tiki tribe are a bit dump as the main protagonists while the lack of truly great original musical tracks is disappointing, just saying.
WELCOME (BACK) TO THE JUNGLE
But to be perfectly honest when the core platforming is this good and imaginative, the style so beautiful and endearing, and the secrets so bountiful and satisfying to unlock then we can excuse some rubbish enemy designs and only having great remixes of David Wise’s classic tracks.
While feeling very familiar, Donkey Kong Country Returns is the best game in its series, without question, the best 2D platformer on Wii, far outperforming Mario’s own effort without question, and an applaud worthy debut for a company more used to dealing with immersive first person shooting adventures.
Marrying the scope, grandeur, and attention to detail of a western game with the impeccably smooth and technically refined style of a true Nintendo product, Donkey Kong Country Returns is not only a comforting, and at times crushingly difficult, nostalgic hug, it’s also an incredibly well designed and extremely fun platform game.
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