Super Mario Odyssey will go down as my favourite game on the Nintendo Switch and whilst I was hopeful for some kind of follow-up on the Nintendo Switch, I also had a weird feeling that we’d see a new 3D Donkey Kong game, so when Donkey Kong Bananza was revealed to be in development by the Odyssey team, it really felt like the best possible outcome.
Playing through the demo, I was a little overwhelmed at first, just because this felt like an entirely new experience and there hasn’t been a 3D Donkey Kong game in a long, long while, so it wasn’t as immediately obvious what I was supposed to be doing like it would be in a 3D Mario game, but the way that they’ve evolved the familar gameplay mechanics of a Donkey Kong sidescroller into a 3D world feels absolutely brilliant.
You’ll notice that just like in Mario Kart World and the recent Mario movie, Donkey Kong sports his brand new look which is a lot more charismatic, and less angry, but his character model and the entire world of Bananza absolutely shine on the Switch 2 in 4K goodness. When Donkey Kong swims, his fur glistens moistly, and the lighting that is projected throughout the few different worlds that I got to explore really gives life to the game in a way that I haven’t seen in a Nintendo game before.
Just like in Mario Odyssey, it seems that the main mechanic in Donkey Kong Bananza will be collecting golden bananas, through a variety of different ways. Some will be clearly be very true to the core missions within each level, there’s a lot of little challenge levels, and I feel like the rest will be hidden within the walls and floors of the game. Outside of the Golden Bananas, there’s a lot of other little artifacts and gems to collect, keeping true to the collect-a-thon nature of Donkey Kong games.
Really though, the most impressive thing about Donkey Kong Bananza is that not only can everything within the world be destroyed to find new areas and depths, the destruction will remain not only within the actual level, but it’s even represented on the world map as well. I’ll need to see how this holds up long term, but it’s a very, very impressive destruction system.
You can smash through any surface around, above or below you with a number of signature Donkey Kong moves like the hand slap and the ground pound as well as a bunch of new tricks and I’m sure there will be more along the way as well. There were a few times that I would lose Donkey Kong just based on where the camera was sitting, but I think that’s just something that you’ll get used to the more you play.
The destruction plays into exploration and combat as well, with you needing to rip different surfaces up (they all have their own characteristics) to attack enemies with, both by swinging rocks or by throwing directly at them, and for instance, an enemy might have a shield or armour that can only be destroyed by a certain type of rock before you can pound them to oblivion.
And as for exploration, you can also uses pieces of rock as a skateboard to easily get around the world. There’s also a lot of little puzzle mechanics, with the main one that I saw being shifty stones which basically allow you to transform platforms into the surface that you throw on them, so you might need to use rock to create platforms to get across to another platform for instance.
I did get some glimpses of more traditional Donkey Kong gameplay as well, with one of the challenges needing me to time bouncing between barrels, and another one being a more traditional side to side Donkey Kong section.
The thing I loved most about Bananza is that I watched a few other people play it, and saw them discover totally different things to me. This is truly the open world 3D Donkey Kong game that we’ve always dreamed of, and there couldn’t be a better team developing it.
Donkey Kong Bananza launches exclusively for Nintendo Switch 2 on July 7th. The Author was flown to New York as a guest of Ninetndo.
