3.5/5 ★ – Slickips's review of Donkey Kong Country.

That Miyamoto held disdain for this title is a bit of a surprise to me, because this time around, “Donkey Kong Country” read to me as the SNES’ “Super Mario Bros.” This isn’t to suggest that the original DKC took the side-scrolling platformer a step back; its design bears a simplicity reminiscent of the NES golden classic. “Donkey Kong Country” is a hop-and-bop platformer with an emphasis on difficulty, momentum, and jump timing with a far more technologically advanced presentation and better designed levels. Many claim that its sequel is the stronger title (a claim that I agree with), but that “Super Mario Bros” is continuously heralded as an all-time masterpiece, often over this, is one I can’t get behind. Both are solid platformers at their core, but with all due respect to Mr. Miyamoto, “Donkey Kong Country” wins the banana overall. The elephant in the room is the game’s landmark visual presentation. Whereas many purely 3D titles have aged like milk graphically, DKC’s signature brand of deceptive pre-rendered magic still bursts with cohesive color and expression. “Donkey Kong Country” creates an atmospheric packing visual variety and dimensionality, thanks to its visual. Each sprite bears a clear-cut legibility: never once does the player question what they’re looking at. Whether stomping on armored crocodiles in the jungle or riding a minecart in a dank cave, “Donkey Kong Country” grabs its audience with a gorilla’s grip. The soundtrack (composed by David Wise), plays a large role in the game’s immersive power. “Jungle Hijinx” is an excellent example: launching energetically into a highly percussive opening, the game stokes a curious flame to explore the jungle, and then it lulls us into something moodier, settling us in to the environment’s natural rhythms. Mechanically, the game works off of our pair of playable characters: Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong. Diddy is the most acrobatically talented between the two. With higher jumping, higher bounces off of enemies, and a cartwheel for smoothly gaining momentum, he will be your best friend in navigating the game’s more frustrating platforming sections. Rare Ltd really tried to give Donkey Kong some merits of his own by giving him the power to take out tougher enemies in one jump, but his larger sprite and slower speed make him a liability in many places. The game does grant you the option to tag-out the Kongs at any time, but this will mostly be used to strategically preserve Diddy for the later difficulty spikes of any given level. Regardless of which Kong you play as, both can use their rolls to acquire solid momentum, allowing both to nimbly navigate each stage … even if Diddy is generally better at doing so. The majority of the game’s difficulty spikes revolve around the saving metagame. As you enter each new world, you are forced to fight through three to five stages before the opportunity to save your game presents itself either through Candy Kong’s save-points or through Funky’s Flights (by which you can travel to a previous world in which Candy’s stop is available). Each individual stage progresses in trickiness fairly enough, introducing new ideas and developing them slowly as the level moves (oftentimes in a three beat structure). It’s these transitions between worlds where you must fight to the next save point when the game becomes “old school hard.” The one between Vine Valley and Gorilla Glaciers remains the most infuriating to me. Being thrown into a slippery ice world is already a challenge enough, but having to refamiliarize yourself with the mechanics of five different stages before being able to save makes it the game’s most unforgiving portion. At its core, “Donkey Kong Country” rewards players for simultaneous speed and precision, as “Super Mario Bros” did before it, with the exception of a few parts which take traversal out of the player’s hands; patience and daring are required to keep afloat in Donkey Kong’s world, but the lavish visual variety is enough to keep one going. “Donkey Kong Country” is also infamously cryptic in its stash of secrets and collectibles. Unlike “Diddy’s Conquest” after it, the four KONG letters are the only collectible kept track of in the game many of which are hidden in specific, secret rooms in each stage. Many of these house small platforming challenges which reward a curious player with opportunities for more lives and bananas; for the observant player, keeping an eye out for these saves more time in the long run in avoiding Game Overs. There are also animal buddy tokens, which, when three of a kind are collected, also grant a player more lives … claims of the game’s unforgiving difficulty are mitigated in its bounteous opportunities to keep the fight for the next opportunity to save going. The four animal buddies are also available within the main stages, granting the Kongs a more powerful mode of transport. Expresso the Ostrich is the exception: he gives greater speed and jumping height in exchange for the capacity to damage enemies. This means that you will lose Expresso about three seconds after acquiring him and may get thrown into a pit with his fleeing momentum because of it. In moments where Rambi or Winky would be helpful, Expresso is never a welcome sight. The game’s bosses slack off in terms of maintaining the game’s level of challenge, until you reach King K. Rool at the end. Like the stages, his tactics are deceptively simple but develop in interesting ways as the fight continues. Even simply dodging his taller, wider sprite as he just runs back and forth across the stage can prove a deadlier obstacle than many of the game’s bottomless pits and indestructible enemies. The fight also blesses us with the game’s best theme, “Gangplank Galleon,” a simple but hard rocking anthem, proper for the pirate king of the crocodiles. This fight remains a highlight, despite how well I know his patterns and tells, which make the previous boss fights feel increasingly disillusioning each time I return to this game. “Donkey Kong Country” is not the best offering that would come from both Rare and from Donkey Kong specifically, but it remains a tight, atmospheric classic. It’s short, sweet, and properly challenging, although many of its central ideas do little to push the 2D platform further as a genre beyond its visuals. What it lacks in invention it makes up for in its down-to-earth design. It not only presents a world cool to occupy, but a cool one to master exploring. It feels good getting better at this game each time I return to it, and between the music, momentum, and well-designed final boss, chances are that I won’t abandon “Donkey Kong Country” as a reliable antidote for a platformer fix anytime soon. Rating: 3.5/5