Donkey Kong Bananza - Switch 2 Review

For years, we’ve heard rumblings about a 3D Donkey Kong game, and as soon as we convinced ourselves that it wasn’t real, Nintendo revealed Donkey Kong Bananza in the April Nintendo Direct. From the same development team that brought us Super Mario Odyssey, Donkey Kong Bananza is a 3D platformer but adds to it by allowing the player to utilise DK’s strength and smash through most of the terrain.

The plot is centred around Donkey Kong and a young future mayor of New Donk City, Pauline. When a meddling trio of kongs known as VoidCo threaten Donkey Kong’s source of bananas with their desire to reach the Banandium Root, it’s up to DK’s strength and Pauline’s powerful singing voice to ensure the safety of bananas and return Pauline to the surface.

The Good

Everything about Donkey Kong Bananza is focused around what the famous gorilla does best: smash things! Most of the terrain is breakable and, let me tell you right now, running around destroying everything in sight feels absolutely incredible. Each action feels visceral: the deep crunching sounds, the subtle rumbles, and the visual chaos elevate the game to a point where if there was an award for best game feeling, it would win hands down.

The gameplay is so well complemented by the cast of Bananza transformations, with each providing unique gameplay mechanics. And in classic Nintendo fashion, they’ve done such wonderful work creating puzzle challenges—whether in the open sublayers or in bite-sized challenge areas akin to the Shrines in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. As you unlock more Bananza transformations and upgrade them with the Banandium Gems you collect, the sublayers become playgrounds for the player to explore with such empowering autonomy.

When you have 16 sublayer biomes and each one stands out as unique from one to the next, it’s certainly a testament to the development team’s passion. Each area feels substantially different from the next, from the biome colors to the theme, level design, music, and tone; it’s absolutely a rainbow of level design variety. And in a game that features much larger areas compared to your other Nintendo 3D platformers, allowing DK to roam and bash freely, the Big N works its magic once again.

For a duo that started on rocky terms back in 1981, their latest adventure is a heartwarming tale filled with genuinely touching moments. Their dynamic is a clear contrast—Donkey Kong, the larger-than-life, exuberant hero, and Pauline, the more reserved but kind-hearted soul. As the story unfolds, Donkey Kong helps Pauline overcome her stage fright and embrace her singing voice, allowing the gorilla to transform into a variety of different Bananza forms. And it’s not just in the main cutscenes that their relationship blossoms—throughout each sublayer, you can discover and unlock Getaways where, after resting to refill your heart metre, optional dialogues are triggered in which Pauline opens up about her worries, ranging from deep-seated anxieties to mistaking DK’s tummy rumblings for thunder. It’s all very sweet and heartwarming and a nice way to keep the relationship blossoming during more gameplay-centric periods.

TL;DR

• Destroying the terrain feels incredible
• Bananza transformations compliments everything the game does
• Beautiful sublayers to explore
• The dynamic between DK and Pauline is beautiful

The Bad

I don’t think you were going to have a 3D game where you can smash freely into the worlds and not going to have camera challenges. With the camera having a mostly set distance from DK, it’s unavoidable for the player to run into some challenges, including awkward camera positions, losing sight of DK, visibility into non-explored spaces and, according to some reports (including myself once or twice), bouts of motion sickness.

Prior to launch, media were expressing concerns of frame rate issues. I even attended a Nintendo Switch 2 event prior to its launch and having had a quick go at Donkey Kong Bananza there, I also noticed these dips. This became bigger news primarily because it is the first single-player adventure on Nintendo Switch 2 from Nintendo itself, and especially one from the same team as Super Mario Odyssey. And while they’re certainly not as frequent as my initial playthrough had me concerned about, the game is certainly not without its occasional technical hiccups. Game performance only hindered me once or twice, the biggest being in a late-game boss fight, which cost me a couple hearts, but above all, it was mostly clear sailing (uhh—smashing).

Nintendo are no strangers to having talkative companion characters (looking at you, Navi), and Pauline feels like another iteration of this trend. She’s nowhere near as frustrating as some others, but the annoyance primarily comes from her instance of exclaiming “Oh, a banana!” every single time, which is very, very frustrating. Her voice acting and character development are very well done, as pointed out earlier, but her insistence on commenting on almost everything you do gets old quick. I understand that much of the game is about giving her the confidence to use her voice, but can she, like, simmer down a bit?

TL;DR

• Camera challenges
• Slight technical hiccups
• Pauline, you’re just, uhh… a little much. Simmer down. K, thanks.

Final Score: 9/10

Donkey Kong Bananza is such a near-perfect game that hits so many marks with precision and gusto. It boasts the Nintendo game philosophy we’ve come to expect from the core development team. While I have some slight niggling complaints, there’s no doubt that Donkey Kong Bananza will be remembered fondly for decades to come, joining the same conversations that often feature the likes of Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Thank you for checking out our Donkey Kong Bananza Switch review, thank you to Nintendo AU/NZ for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

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