With Donkey Kong Bananza ($69.99), Nintendo puts the gorilla back atop the food chain. After all, Donkey Kong was a video game star before Mario. Bananza leverages Nintendo's years of platformer experience and blends it with new action-adventure ideas to create the best 3D hop-and-bop title in some time. The rich, innovative, and action-packed gameplay systems let you tear through the earth itself and dig your way to victory. For its unique flavor and many fun-filled elements, Donkey Kong Bananza is the king of the platformer jungle, a game of the year candidate, and an Editors' Choice winner for Switch 2 games.

Story and Music: An Underground Adventure

Donkey Kong Bananza is a giant love letter to people who adore the big ape. The story follows Kong as he dives deep into an underground world in search of golden bananas. Joining him is a younger version of breakout Mario star Pauline, who wants to return to the surface world and pursue her passion for singing. Along the way, they clash with a group of villainous primates operating a nefarious mining operation.

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Although there isn't a tremendous amount of story, what’s in place is charming and heartwarming. It feels a bit more significant than the typical Nintendo game, mostly due to the narrative emphasis on Kong and Pauline's growing bond. It helps that Pauline is fully voiced. During moments of downtime, when Kong rests at camps found throughout the world, Pauline even gives him words of encouragement. The parental protector bond is almost like BioShock's Big Daddy and his Little Sister, albeit not as gross.

Donkey Kong Bananza also puts a big emphasis on music, which makes sense considering this franchise once asked you to control Kong with bongos. Besides listening to Pauline's songs, your journey involves seeking wisdom from animal elders, who transform into interdimensional DJs to empower you with sick beats. While previous Donkey Kong games opted for more ethereal, nature-based soundscapes, Bananza leans into frenetic, Splatoon-esque jams. 

Fans of classic Donkey Kong titles are in for a treat, as Bananza overflows with nostalgia for past Kong titles, particularly the Donkey Kong Country side-scrollers. It's as if Nintendo's internal team looked at prior games developed by partners Rare and Retro Studios and asked, "What if we tried that?" Nintendo gets rightful criticism for relying on the same handful of franchises, but it’s cool to see so much production value go into pumping up a character who has only sporadically headlined games.

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A Deep, Dense World to Explore

Donkey Kong Bananza was developed by the same Nintendo team behind Super Mario Odyssey. That game's design philosophy forms Bananza's 3D platforming fundamentals. This isn't an open-world title, but each level is a vast and dense sandbox that begs you to find fun in any direction. It took me about 20 hours to reach the end credits, but the sizable post-game action revealed that there were many more secrets to find.

The underground world gimmick provides a cool excuse to make stages very vertical. Bigger levels contain multiple sublayers, where Kong dives into a deeper part of the stage and back again. This creates more elaborate missions that require you to understand the level geometry. Along with running and rolling, Kong can jump and climb up most surfaces, so even the highest peaks are surprisingly accessible. Compared with nimble Mario, Kong moves with an agility and weight that wonderfully expresses that he's not a man; he’s an animal.

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Although the game takes place beneath the Earth's surface, you'll see a lot more than dirt. The underground world is imaginative and visually pleasing. One layer is a serene hilltop, while another is a wide canyon full of rideable mine carts. The frequent use of surreal colors gives the environments an almost alien and otherworldly vibe, like something from a Godzilla movie. But despite the strangeness, I found the art direction overall more cohesive and coherent than Odyssey's more random approach.

Gameplay: Ripping and Tearing the Environment

On top of all this is Bananza's standout destruction system. Kong can tear through nearly every part of this world, whether it’s digging for buried treasure or ripping up and tossing rock chunks. Realizing you can go almost anywhere you can imagine makes the world fascinating to explore. Kong's sonar clap reveals hidden bananas and fossils that you'll only find by smashing walls. Initially, it's just raw fun, breaking everything you can simply for the sake of it. But beyond basic rampages, the system soon reveals its hidden genius and potential for deep, free-form creativity. 

Different materials have different elemental properties, leading to puzzles that blend the best ideas from games like Minecraft, Red Faction: Guerrilla, and even The Legend of Zelda. Need to catch a fast-moving creature? Toss mud at it to slow it down. Need to reach a far-off location? You can use chunks of environmental materials to enhance Kong's jump or surf across environments. Chunks have different durability stats, with some requiring more punches to destroy. But good old explosives solve everything.

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There's so much freedom that you may accidentally put yourself in a less-than-ideal situation. For example, you may dig too deep underground, requiring you to spend a few minutes punching your way back up. Or you may place yourself in such an odd location that the camera has trouble tracking you. Fortunately, you can teleport to a checkpoint at any time, and even reset the entire terrain with a button press. Like Super Mario Galaxy's mind-bending gravity, Bananza has an occasionally disorienting adjustment period as you wrap your head around the off-kilter possibilities.

Once it clicks, Bananza’s world is gloriously messy and ripe for exploration. It feels far more organic compared with Astro Bot and Super Mario 3D World, platformers with more conservative, linear structures and limited options. Bananza has many more tightly designed platforming challenges, too. Each level is littered with bonus rooms that serve as bite-sized obstacle courses, including a handful inspired by retro 2D Donkey Kong Country stages. But even those more traditional challenges still bring the new mechanics to the forefront. Why risk jumping over a laser when you can safely dig under it? 

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Kong-Size Combat

Along with the increased sense of adventure, Bananza has a noticeable increase in action. Kong can constantly choose violence, whether it's punching enemies, smashing them with rocks, or aiming and tossing environmental chunks like projectiles. He feels extremely powerful, definitely a gorilla who could take on 100 guys, and the combat compares nicely with pure action titles. Many challenge rooms involving fighting waves of enemies, beat 'em up style. Terrain still plays a role there; for example, skeletal enemies are much tougher to defeat when they're covered in concrete instead of sand.

It helps that Bananza's other major gameplay system greatly opens combat, platforming, and puzzle-solving options. Kong can transform into a variety of animals, each with radically different move sets. The zebra can dash across crumbling terrain at high speeds, while the ostrich can glide over currents and bombard foes with egg bombs. You must build up a meter before you can transform, and transformations don't last forever, but the new forms feel more meaningful than Odyssey's one-off abilities. I like that you can bust them out at any time and potentially find use for the alter egos anywhere. Sure, a boss fight may telegraph when you should run away in zebra form, but flying around stages as the ostrich took me to places I genuinely felt like I shouldn't be able to go. 

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You can further customize Kong by changing his outfits and cashing bananas for RPG-esque skill points. These tangible upgrades incentivize you to seek out the game's many collectibles. The customization can also make the game a tad too overcomplicated, a funny contrast to the mindless destruction. Some skills and buffs just didn't seem worthwhile, like running slightly faster in snow or taking slightly less damage from certain enemies. 

However, other upgrades are absolute game changers that I can't imagine playing without. Extending the ostrich's glide dramatically increases your mobility, while boosting the zebra's offensive capabilities turns the game into a speedrunner's dream. You can rearrange skills after you purchase them to create the perfect Kong loadout. These features enhance the game's wonderful sandbox quality and make it feel even more substantial.

Graphics and Performance

After Mario Kart World, Bananza is Nintendo's next flagship Switch 2 title, and it takes advantage of the high-powered hybrid console in several key ways. For starters, it's just beautiful. Nintendo’s vibrant art style continues to shine at higher resolutions with the additional detail and fidelity. 

The terrain destruction system, with all the variables it must consider, probably would not have worked on a weaker machine. In fact, I experienced frame rate drops when the screen was completely showered in particles. It reminded me of slowdown in old-school shmups when the screen filled with enemies and gunfire, or building an especially elaborate contraption in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The performance drop is unfortunate, but it feels almost earned, a forgivable price to pay for such ambition.

Donkey Kong Bananza has co-op play where a second player can use the mouse functionality to aim and shoot Pauline's words. Her singing is so powerful that those words can kill. Super Mario Galaxy had a similar mode, but Bananza's is more successful because the second player can do damage that actually helps out player one. With GameShare, you can beam Bananza even to a Switch 1 for co-op action, but I couldn't test the feature before launch.

Finally, DK Artist is a nifty 3D riff on Mario Paint. With it, you can carve and customize various rock sculptures using the Switch 2's mouse. You can craft some impressive works of "art," and I like how this fits the game's overall creative theme.

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