Donkey Kong 3

So I think the general gameplay goes like this:

You are some gardener that tries to spray Donkey Kong, who is here for whatever reason, away from causing chaos. You start the game and see the power up that completely negates any difficulty the game has and breeze through the first couple levels. Then you run out of that power up and then play the actual game which is somehow less fun in comparison. You eventually lose all your lives and maybe see the one frame of Donkey Kong's head in a beehive, which provides you some serotonin, and then you turn off the game and swap it for a better or more interesting one like Donkey Kong.

Does anyone actually come back to this and not the other two games that preceded it instead?

Another case of an arcade game sequel being an extreme departure from previous entries, but unlike with Dig Dug where you could still see a lot of similarities if you just squinted a bit, the only thing this has in common with previous titles are that it's a video game and that there's a giant ape. This is more akin to a fixed shooter like Space Invaders than the platforming gauntlets you'd expect, and while on its own this would be absolutely no problem at all, given the way so many of these arcade series ended up changing things up to make it feel worth getting a grip on a whole new game to sink your coins into, what really becomes a problem is that the game itself also really sucks. The biggest problem I have is the strong imbalance between how readily you can handle what's thrown at you depending on whether you have one specific powerup, but neither state providing anything even resembling a middle ground.

Either you pathetically fire away with your basic sprayer which deals with everything at such a slow pace that it's almost impossible to both consistently keep shooting Donkey Kong while also keeping the swarms of enemies at bay, or you get the powerup and are able to spam away and beat stages in 5 - 10 seconds without moving from your starting location. In either case it just doesn't feel at all engaging to mess around with and it feels like it lacks this underlying sense of concrete strategy that can be learned with enough practice, always feeling a bit stupid to deal with at even the best of times. The stage progression is also rather unfortunate in the way that it focuses more heavily on adding new enemy types rather than focusing more heavily on potential level layouts to explore. This is mainly a problem because even the basic waves of enemies feel pretty intense and erratic to deal with, with the stages themselves being extremely simple and almost unchanging.

By adding new stage layouts that are subtly different in a number of ways, it could recontextualise even these basic enemies and craft a far less repetitive experience compared to focusing on introducing new enemies that functionally feel basically the same anyway, all of them being erratic flying menaces that you can never quite get the pattern down for. This would also lead to a far smoother difficulty curve where the player could have a bit more breathing room compared to the mountainous spikes that occur whenever you start a new stage. Overall I kinda like what the idea was here, turning every level into a pseudo-boss fight while also defending against hordes of other enemies, creating a neat balancing act where attention has to be paid to both elements to succeed. Unfortunately though, as is, it's an absolute pain to get anything done in it and is either far too unforgiving and chaotic, or too braindead and easy to really feel like you're accomplishing anything.