Review: Donkey Kong Country Returns

Donkey Kong Country Returns is a 2-d platformer for the Nintendo Wii, and a game that I very much enjoyed playing through. It isn't without flaws, but has incredibly few, and those handful are far outweighed by the excellent level design, solid pacing, good collectibles, and overall good character of the game.

First of all, as I mentioned, the level design of this game is generally just excellent. Each level has enough of its own uniqueness to really shine, and even the instant-kill-if-you-screw-up mine cart levels don't come off as too bad, usually thanks to conveniently-placed extra lives, as well as the general number of lives that you get in the game and relative lack of punishment for losing all of them. Individual gimmicks often don't leave the level they are introduced in, which is a little dissapointing when you've beaten them, but each level has enough replay value (usually in the form of collectibles) to make you happy to go back them; it's probably best this way anyway, as overusing some of the more unique gimmicks would probably make them stale. They are often difficult, but checkpoints are usually very well placed so that while you do feel punished for dying, it's not excessive. The difficulty in this game is handled quite well as well - the game starts out pretty easy, but about halfway really kicks it into high gear and only gets harder from there; however, there are items that can be used to make levels *much* easier, as well as a "super guide" option that is becoming more popular in recent Nintendo games, where the game will clear the level for you should you desire it to after a certain number of deaths.

Honestly, it's hard to find words to praise this game. It doesn't do anything incredibly out of the ordinary, it doesn't have any particular mechanic that makes the game incredibly fun (except, perhaps, for the unexpected (and welcome) high (but fair) level of difficulty), and no aspect of the game stands out as the most praiseworthy. It simply delivers incredibly solid base mechanics combined with extremely good level design sprinkled with enough gimmicks to keep it from becoming dull. It's just an all-around amazing game.

However, as I said, I definitely do not think the game could not be improved. Firstly, I think that the "hidden" items are too often hidden in exactly the same places throughout the different levels. After you've played the game for a while, it was frequently *very* obvious where a hidden item was just by glancing at the area. A certain amount of this is fine (and good, even), of course, and even late in the game the game did sometimes surprise me, but far too often it was just too obvious where the hidden items were. The biggest offender in this was heading left from the start of the level - something like a full quarter (maybe more) of the levels had something "hidden" right there. Additionally, the mini-games to get the hidden puzzle pieces became repetitive pretty quickly - there definitely could've been more variety there.

The co-op play, while definitely fun, also had some pretty large flaws, to me. The player who played as Diddy Kong received a jetpack and peanut-guns, but the player who played as Donkey Kong received nothing in return; making the second player noticeably more powerful than the first. Additionally, if they players chose to have Diddy ride on Donkey's back (a good inclusion in the game, as some of the puzzles become much harder if one tries to tackle them seperately), all the second player can do is shoot peanuts in a predetermined path - they cannot even aim their shots. My personal changes here would be to take away something from Diddy that only Donkey can do (probably give him a worse base attack and a weaker ground pound), and allow Diddy to aim his peanuts to make the second player more interactive while in a combined form - perhaps using an onscreen cursor. Another problem is that the final unlockable mode (1 health, no diddy, no items, mirrored levels), which serves as one last, long challenge to the player after having completed pretty much everything in the game, cannot be played co-op. While I don't see a good way to make it playable co-op and still maintain the intended level of challenge, it's still frustrating to see the (potentially quite long) final challenge of the game to be inaccessible to two people who have played the game together up until that point.

(On a side note, I wouldn't balance the co-op by adding new powers to Donkey when Diddy leaves his back, as that would be weird with the single-player and Diddy's status in it as just an upgrade. Rather, Diddy should simply have weaker abilities in certain areas than Donkey's standard ones.)

Two smaller complaints that I have is that 1) the final boss battle, upon death, denies you Diddy Kong, making him much harder on later attempts than your first attempt on him, and 2) the reward for beating all the hidden levels is somewhat unsatisfying. You get one new (incredibly bizarre, and not nearly as difficult as some of the levels you had to beat to access it) level, and then you unlock the above-mentioned extremely difficult final mode of the game. The single level feels tacked-on due to its relative shortness and lack of extreme difficulty (and, as I mentioned, just has a very strange design), and the unlockable reward, while good on its own, feels like a strange prize for beating that level. I have heard, however, that that one level was initially supposed to be an entire new world and was cut for time purposes, which would explain it.

All in all, as I said, this was a great, fun game with only couple of minor flaws. My lessons learned would ultimately be this:

-As if it wasn't already obvious, a game doesn't have to have big innovations to be great - sometimes playing it safe is perfectly fine. Solid gameplay with extremely good level design can make a great game all by itself.
-Co-op should be balanced - ideally, if there are different characters, they should have different (but at least theoretically balanced) abilities.
-If a player respawns right at the beginning of a boss (or any particularly challenging area) upon death, he should do so at full power or at the power at which he first made it to the boss. This could probably be expanded further into a whole post covering when to give the player expendable things for free (and when to deny the player them), but that is a post for another time.