4/5 ★ – nldemo's review of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle: Donkey Kong Adventure.

Short Review for a short DLC. Personal HLTB ~10 hours Mario + Rabbids DK Adventure was a cozy little DLC to get me back in the mood for Sparks of Hope. Unlike the main game, in this DLC you are locked in to only three characters. Rabbid Peach returns as the primary comic relief, but is now joined by Rabbid Kranky and DK himself. DK has a unique ability where he can throw objects (such as cover or fire blocks), enemies, or characters themselves. He also has a unique traversal technique that allows him to swing from imaginary vines in the sky. The player toss technique is best combo'd with Rabbid Kranky twice per turn, and once you realize that the battles start becoming much easier. When tossing Kranky, he gets an extra shot on the enemies below him as he comes in for a landing. Pretty spiffy. Combine this with the ability to slide through enemies, and Peach's multi slide, and you can have most enemies severely hurting before you even use the action portion of your turn. Grant Kirkhope returns to do a remix of the usual DK scores, which is much appreciated. None of the music stands out specifically above the originals, but it is still pleasing to listen to regardless. The zones you navigate through in this game are few, but varied enough to be appreciated. Unlike Sparks of Hope, the world you navigate inbetween fights is mostly linear. However, there are enough secrets and flavor stuff thrown in that I don't mind it at all! Not EVERY game needs to be open world! The main theme of the game is the tropical beachy one, and the mini bosses being dressed up as sharks is quite appropriate. Rabbid DK also makes a return in this game, and is the new reoccurring boss. The final showdown with him is pretty unique, but the other fight(s) don't stand out much from anything else in the game. The difficulty never gets too bad, with basically the same rinse and repeat on every map with slightly different terrain. Every once in a while the game throws a unique mechanic at you, but for the most part you can just plan to kill all the baddies in each battle. If you don't get a score you like, you can easily replay any mission or wait until the end and then redo them from a menu. There are optional puzzle pieces to collect across the world, but the reward isn't really worth it. You get unique weapons which can be purchased if you have enough bananas before the final boss fight... which might help a little, but not a lot. Otherwise, the weapons you get access to from beating the final boss are just as good (if not better). One nice thing is the game does keep track of where you have collected or missing the puzzle pieces, so after you beat the game you can easily warp to that "zone" and find the ones you missed. Hint - look in all directions and you should be fine. In addition to the puzzle pieces, there are lots of moving block puzzles which mostly contain unlockable art or soundtrack. These are never toooo hard (some are a bit harder than others), can be totally skipped if you don't care, but sometimes will have a unlockable rune at the end which allows you to progress further in the talent tree, so worth it imo. Overall, I give this 8 bananas out of 10 and i'm looking forward to sparks of hope!