Donkey Kong Country Returns

Donkey Kong Country Returns is a modern platformer in the Country series and is split up into multiple levels spanning the multiple worlds; Jungle, Beach, Ruins, Cave, Forest, Cliff, Factory, and Volcano. The levels are crammed full of danger, with moving platforms, crumbling platforms, swinging vines, rising lava, and plenty of enemies.

Despite looking like a child friendly game, it is fiendishly tough, and even though its frustrating at times, it is very addictive and you come back for more. With a bit of practice and patience, levels can be completed and will provide a huge sense of achievement.

Throughout the levels, there is plenty to collect and many secret areas to look out for. Bananas are the basic item and 100 of them gives an extra life. Coins are mainly in hidden locations and allow you to purchase items such as extra life balloons from Cranky Kong. Jigsaw pieces and the letters K-O-N-G are usually placed in hidden or slightly out of reach areas. To collect these, you will have to carefully look out for them and potentially risk your life to attain them.

In addition to the platform levels, there Mine Cart and Jet Barrel levels. In the mine cart levels; you ride along a set track, jumping over broken tracks and dodging enemies until you reach the end. In the Jet Barrel levels you have control moving upwards and have to let gravity bring you down. Trouble is, there are plenty of hazards to dodge and often requires trial and error to find the correct path through the dangers.

The levels are very busy and wonderfully designed and the game has some of the best graphics on the Wii. An amazing feature is how the levels change dynamically as you play. Objects from the background fall into the foreground, platforms crumble, barrels fire you into the background which creates a marvellous experience.

You play as Donkey Kong throughout, although Diddy Kong will hang on once collected from the DK barrel found at certain parts of the levels. Diddy adds extra health and a bit more control. If Diddy is in play, you can use his jet pack to hover in the air adding extra distance to your jumps, or allowing you to stall mid-air and avoid danger. When rolling to attack, having Diddy adds extra length to the rolling process. Both DK and Diddy have 2 health icons and so being hit twice will lose Diddy, and a life will be lost once DK is defeated. Falling off the screen is instant death though, and you will be returned to the start of the level, or to the last checkpoint if applicable.

The game can be controlled with the remote on its own or by the Nunchuk and remote. Most people favour the latter but I felt both control schemes worked well. By shaking the remote, you will perform a ground pound, will roll if holding a horizontal direction, or blow if holding down. These moves are sometimes necessary to interact with the environment, and there are plenty of objects to interact with to collect extra bananas, coins and to find the jigsaw pieces.

If you have enough patience and want a challenge, Donkey Kong Country is a must own because it probably is the best game on the Wii. The graphics are superb, it is challenging, fun, and has a high replay value because there is a lot to collect, and time trial challenges to complete.

It's hard to know what to expect when a developer like Retro Studios takes over a franchise as highly regarded as the Donkey Kong Country series. But with the Metroid Prime trilogy behind them I knew that they had the capability to go above and beyond the framework that RareWare set out for the platforming juggernaut. With Donkey Kong Country Returns; Retro raises the bar not just for the series, but for all 2D platform games with it's mastery of ALL areas of design. From tight controls that allow for precision manoeuvring, outstanding level design, and a picture perfect difficulty curve. Retro also introduces new elements to the series like Diddy's jet pack function, interactive foreground and backgrounds, and creatively destructive environments. With this review I'm going to attempt to put into words why this is my favourite 2D platformer ever!

The mechanics in this game are very sound. It's a weightier game which makes the pace of the platforming faster than your average game but the directional control is so intimate that precision jumps are easy to pull off so long as your coordination is on point. There are two control schemes (one with and without the nunchuck), I preferred using just the Wiimote since I found that the less buttons you have to manage the better. On paper, flicking the Wiimote vertically to roll sounds like a nightmare, but in practise it works wonderfully as the motion controls are surprisingly responsive. Diddy's jet-pack hovering adds an extra layer of complexity to the controls and is simply a blast to use.

The level design in Donkey Kong Country Returns is arguably it's greatest strength. Almost all of the game's 72 stages feel expertly crafted and present a unique challenge to the player. You'll encounter everything from a giant octopus, crumbling canyons, a mine-shaft full of dastardly moles, killer tsunami waves, and a factory full of bionic hands (to name just a few!). The famed mine-cart and Rambi levels return and are as intense and difficult as ever before! And this game introduces a new type of auto-scroller by way of the rocket barrel levels which presents some of the game's funnest moments. The controls for using the rocket are so simple yet manoeuvring through the often outrageous obstacles proves to be a challenge not suited for mere casual players. >: )

The boss battles are fairly consistent throughout this game. Some of these encounters include a trio of crab pirate captains, a chicken in a mech suit, and the foreman of the mole mining coalition. These are some creative boss fights that are honestly quite challenging! Although Donkey Kong Country Returns is a consistently challenging and patience testing game, it never feels unfair. This is (again) because the controls are so tight and stuff like the level designs and enemy placements are so carefully calculated. But it's also because of the game's buttery smooth difficulty curve that increases at a rate that really allows for player growth and skill refinement. In terms of longevity this is the longest DKC game at 72 stages (8 worlds), and there's a f*** ton of secret puzzle pieces to find and special challenge stages to unlock by way of collecting all 4 kong letters in every stage for each world.

To be frank, the story in this game is pretty minimal. Essentially what happens are some strange tiki creatures invade Donkey Kong Island and hypnotise all of the island's inhabitants to steal all of Donkey Kong's bananas. Donkey Kong and his pal Diddy must then scale the island (just like in the original Donkey Kong Country) to ultimately break the curse. The story really just presents itself as an excuse to make all of these areas and levels but it's still pretty cute all the same. Presentation wise the game sports a fair art direction with some really cool "silhouette themed" levels thrown in for good measure. The soundtrack is pretty decent as well, mostly consisting of reworked versions of classic tunes from the original SNES game, my favourite being the return of Life in the Mines!

Simply put Donkey Kong Country Returns is 2D Platforming poetry. It's the gold standard to which I judge all other games in the genre. Never have I played a game that demonstrates so much of what makes games fun, gratifying, and fair. Sure it's hard, uncompromising even... But so rarely do we see game developers now'a'days make games without constantly pampering us and slapping on training wheels. Retro dares to give us the benefit of the doubt by letting us prove that we can best even the most awesome challenges through hard work and determination. This is the type of game that an accomplished gamer puts on their resume, well done.

(Note: I have tried both versions, but didn't finish the game until playing the 3DS port. It's a definite improvement, but the controls are problematic in both.)

Retro Studios did a great job converting Metroid to 3D, so I was very excited when I saw they were bringing back Donkey Kong Country. The videos of Returns made it look just like the old trilogy, which were all good if not stellar games, but bring back many memories when I play them today. After finishing the game, my verdict is that it stands up well with the first three games from a design perspective. Other issues hold it back to the point where it is my least favorite of them.

Where DKCR shines is in its stage design. Rayman Origins is the game I'll most readily compare it to, and in many ways it's more like that game than DKC. Levels are fast-moving, brutally challenging, and place little secrets or enemies directly in the appropriate places. One of the things the DKC games did well was having a natural flow. Particularly in DKC2, levels were designed so the player would succeed if they kept moving and timed their jumps well. Hesitation and fear often kept you from finishing a stage effectively. This sense of design is still present in DKCR, though describing what happens in said stages in words is both pointless and as challenging as the game. Like with Metroid Prime, Retro Studios clearly knew the series they were reviving well enough to catch what made the games special. The use of the first game's music is a nice touch too, though a few tracks from the other games might have been nice to hear and the new original songs are forgettable. Overall, I think DKCR is a far more interesting game and has a lot more heart in it than the millions of 2D Mario games Nintendo has been pumping out of its programmer slave labor factory in recent years.

While the Donkey Kong Country series had its flaws, I always loved the way the characters controlled in the originals. Rolling, jumping, and bouncing on enemies felt smooth and made levels have a fun and breezy pace. This helped make up for the games' shortcomings compared to better platformers at the time, most notably the needless saturation of bonus games with stupid hiding places. This is unfortunately where DKCR drops the ball.

Donkey Kong Country Returns is an odd duck in its series, that's for sure. It's practically the antithesis of the SNES games. Figuring out how to get all the "KONG" letters and locating puzzle pieces is fun and rewarding even when hair-tearingly difficult, but by the end of the game I lost all drive to do so. Sadly, this game's controls and in some places its physics are poorly conceived. They weren't bad enough to keep me from beating the last boss, but I was glad to see it over with at that point. In the original games, rolling and jumping are mapped to the same button. While that might seem like it could cause some confusion about what button to press, it actually works great. Mario grabbed things and ran with the same button, and so did DK. To a player like me who grew up on those platformers, the idea of pressing a shoulder button or shaking the Wii remote to perform something you want to do as often as a roll is baffling and obtuse. Maybe kids these days think this works, but I sure don't. Many jumps in DKCR require getting a running start, rolling, and then jumping. In all three control schemes provided by the two versions of the game, I think maneuvers like this are uncomfortable and awkward. Minor physics problems pop up too. Sometimes bouncing on an enemy's head just doesn't work as consistently as it should. Sometimes DK's lack of directional influence in the air feels a bit off. A lot of the issues are minor, but they are noticeable when a player is used to better physics in games like Yoshi's Island or Super Metroid.

I've always thought of Donkey Kong Country as an above-average platformer series, and Returns didn't change that. The game has a lot of cool stage designs and some neat aspects going for it, but it's harmed by nonsensical control scheme choices and some lame boss sections. I enjoyed playing the game, but didn't feel like putting in extra time to play all of its secret stages. I will recommend it to platformer fans, but it's no masterpiece; just a good game to play if you don't mind a little (okay, lot of) stress.

Pros
+Keeps true to the platforming style of the originals with minimal waggle.
+Hidden objects and incentives to continue playing after completion.
+Co-op is even more fun when playing at the same time (instead of switching out) and without bumping into each other like New Super Mario Bros. Wii.
+Retains plenty of the challenge of the originals

Cons
-Despite being more fun in co-op, some of the levels don't seem meant for it. In most minecart and all rocket levels, it is easier to have one player control while the other does nothing. In addition to this, every death costs two lives.
-Later minecart and rocket levels become a test of memory rather than platforming skills.

In Summary
Overall a very recommended platformer, especially if you are going to play with a friend, though they may be bored during a few rocket levels.