When the big Nintendo Switch 2 Direct dropped last month, my partner and I dedicated ourselves to staying up to watch it unfold – for little reason other than the small sliver of hope of seeing a new 3D Mario title announced. Any initial disappointment of one not showing up was very quickly assuaged though, by the actual “one last thing” of the tell-all showcase, the reveal of Donkey Kong Bananza.
A brand new 3D Donkey Kong platformer has certainly been a long time coming, and this one promises some bold new ideas bolstered by a core philosophy of outright destruction and demolition. So it was with great excitement that I recently sat down to 20 glorious minutes of Bananza, at a special early access session of this weekend’s Nintendo Switch 2 Experience in Melbourne. My main takeaway? 20 minutes is categorically not enough time to truly savour this game.
That might seem like an obvious statement, but I think it’s even more true for this particular title thanks to its major gimmick that sees DK able to bash and smash his way through a great deal of the game’s environments and set pieces. It’s a Red Faction Guerilla–esque twist where you’re able to punch, smack, tear and dive into actual level geometry in real time, and within just a few seconds of picking up the controller I felt compelled to turn to the Nintendo rep standing behind me to say, “Hey, don’t worry, I know there’s an actual objective to this and I can see the path I need to follow – but I’m doing something here.”
And then proceeded to waste a good chunk of my demo time on the primal act of smashing shit up.
Conversely though, this short preview actually helped to allay some of my early fears about the destruction stuff, which concerned how the freeform smithereening might affect the tight level design that you’d expect from a Nintendo-produced 3D platformer. Thankfully, it does seem like the folks at the helm of this one have enough of a leash on our hairy boy that there’ll be a good balance between giving players structure and letting them go, well, bananas.
The hallmarks of the genre are still well and truly present here, with a heap of different collectibles to seek out, bigger and shinier objectives to find, light environmental puzzles to solve, enemies to tangle with and lots of running and jumping – it’s just that all of these things are also designed with DK’s brute strength in mind. The first baddies I came across were airborne and spiny, so the Mario-informed impulse of jumping on their heads was certainly out of the question, but ripping a chunk of the ground out from below DK’s feet and fanging it at them is outright encouraged.
Similarly, while a lot of obstacles could be surmounted by simply climbing over them as any self-respecting ape would, DK also has the opportunity to just bust on through most walls and floors. Occasionally I would come across something made of particularly special material that required chucking equally special rocks at, or materials that even the big man simply couldn’t power through, but the loosely-guided design and penchant for tucking secrets away in all sorts of places has very big Super Mario Odyssey energy.
I now see why some folks are calling it early that the Odyssey team is, in fact, behind this one. The cadence of its goal setting and its gameplay language are quite reminiscent of that early Switch banger, as is the overall visual identity. It’s an impressive game to behold, naturally much higher in detail and fidelity than any other 3D platformer we’ve seen from Nintendo, but also seriously high-energy with an almost overwhelming amount of colour and movement with debris and effects flying all around the screen.
At this early stage though, it’s perhaps not all bananas and conga beats. In its current form, Bananza tended to struggle under the weight of its own design, with a fair few noticeable and jarring bouts of dropped frames and the kinds of camera woes that it seemed Nintendo had left behind in its modern 3D era. I would hope that there’s still a level of polish to come between whenever this demo was authored and the final release, but it certainly seems a little un-Nintendo to publicly show off a game in a state that’s not representative of the consumer product, so there’s an element of concern there.
It’s just much too tough to pass any kind of real judgment on Donkey Kong Bonanza from such a short, controlled time with the game, though. Some technical stuff aside, this is definitely shaping up to be a must-have for early Switch 2 adopters, if not a bit of a darling B-side to the inevitable marquee Mario titles on the horizon. Will this be the defining moment of DK’s new era? We’ll have to see when it launches exclusively on Nintendo Switch 2 on July 17th.
Previewed at an event hosted by Nintendo ANZ
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