3.5/5 ★ – pugapple's review of Donkey Kong Jungle Beat.

Donkey Kong Jungle Beat - GCN Physical First of all, Jungle Beat rocks. It’s weird and shouldn’t exist which makes it awesome. It feels really nice to successfully chain and combo movement, and frankly the bosses fucking rock. The first time I was confronted with Dread Kong was absolutely legendary. That out of the way, the game does have some hiccups. The bongo controls are both a really awesome novelty and also a dark shadow that looms over the whole experience. The bongos are just frankly limited in their strengths as a controller … particularly for a platformer, so this means the difficulty is pretty difficult to tune while also creating satisfying / engaging gameplay. Something being hard shifts a lot more quickly to irritating or frustrating with the bongos then it would with a standard controller. Like anyone else, I’m never a huge fan of water levels, but water levels in this game…. Damn. Not the best. That being said, there’s a lot that’s genuinely great. The farther you get in the game you can really tell that this is the team that was responsible for Mario Galaxy later this same generation. There is so much character in the environments and NPC designs. I’ve never particularly loved Rare DK but boy did they make him charming here.