3/5 ★ – ThePikesvillain's review of Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest.

80% of DKC2 is fantastic. The gameplay is fun, the controls are mostly excellent, the music is sublime… but certain portions of the game are detrimental to the enjoyment on a game design level. The animals the player rides have a great deal of personality and bring unique gameplay to different sections, but the abilities of the animal mounts are not well explained to the player and often there is no opportunity to explore their abilities. One specific example is with the snake while ascending the tower towards the end of the game while the green poison rises. Death is rising up beneath the player so there is no time to take any time and figure out how to do the high jump which is in itself unintuitive as it involves holding down a different button (not jump, not down) for a prolonged duration and then not pressing jump but simply releasing the button. That is a fine mechanic, but not intuitive in a section where the player dies in 5 seconds if they cannot make the jump which they cannot do without this ability. I like to play retro games without save states or looking things up as long as possible, but I ultimately had to look up what to do because I never would have stumbled on this combination of button inputs and timing on my own. Had I played this games in the 90s I never would have gotten past this on my own and not simply because the game is hard, but because of bad game design and unintuitive controls. All in all I am glad I beat DKC2. I mostly had fun with it. I probably will never play it again. It is often revered more than the original DKC and I must say that I do not agree. DKC2’s highs are on par with DKC, but it also has obtuse design elements that DKC does not.