Donkey Kong Country Returns

(Note: I have tried both versions, but didn't finish the game until playing the 3DS port.  It's a definite improvement, but the controls are problematic in both.) 

Retro Studios did a great job converting Metroid to 3D, so I was very excited when I saw they were bringing back Donkey Kong Country.  The videos of Returns made it look just like the old trilogy, which were all good if not stellar games, but bring back many memories when I play them today.  After finishing the game, my verdict is that it stands up well with the first three games from a design perspective.  Other issues hold it back to the point where it is my least favorite of them.

Where DKCR shines is in its stage design.  Rayman Origins is the game I'll most readily compare it to, and in many ways it's more like that game than DKC. Levels are fast-moving, brutally challenging, and place little secrets or enemies directly in the appropriate places.  One of the things the DKC games did well was having a natural flow. Particularly in DKC2, levels were designed so the player would succeed if they kept moving and timed their jumps well.  Hesitation and fear often kept you from finishing a stage effectively.  This sense of design is still present in DKCR, though describing what happens in said stages in words is both pointless and as challenging as the game.  Like with Metroid Prime, Retro Studios clearly knew the series they were reviving well enough to catch what made the games special. The use of the first game's music is a nice touch too, though a few tracks from the other games might have been nice to hear and the new original songs are forgettable.  Overall, I think DKCR is a far more interesting game and has a lot more heart in it than the millions of 2D Mario games Nintendo has been pumping out of its programmer slave labor factory in recent years.

While the Donkey Kong Country series had its flaws, I always loved the way the characters controlled in the originals.  Rolling, jumping, and bouncing on enemies felt smooth and made levels have a fun and breezy pace.  This helped make up for the games' shortcomings compared to better platformers at the time, most notably the needless saturation of bonus games with stupid hiding places.  This is unfortunately where DKCR drops the ball.

Donkey Kong Country Returns is an odd duck in its series, that's for sure. It's practically the antithesis of the SNES games.  Figuring out how to get all the "KONG" letters and locating puzzle pieces is fun and rewarding even when hair-tearingly difficult, but by the end of the game I lost all drive to do so.  Sadly, this game's controls and in some places its physics are poorly conceived. They weren't bad enough to keep me from beating the last boss, but I was glad to see it over with at that point.  In the original games, rolling and jumping are mapped to the same button. While that might seem like it could cause some confusion about what button to press, it actually works great.  Mario grabbed things and ran with the same button, and so did DK.  To a player like me who grew up on those platformers, the idea of pressing a shoulder button or shaking the Wii remote to perform something you want to do as often as a roll is baffling and obtuse.  Maybe kids these days think this works, but I sure don't. Many jumps in DKCR require getting a running start, rolling, and then jumping.  In all three control schemes provided by the two versions of the game, I think maneuvers like this are uncomfortable and awkward. Minor physics problems pop up too.  Sometimes bouncing on an enemy's head just doesn't work as consistently as it should.  Sometimes DK's lack of directional influence in the air feels a bit off.  A lot of the issues are minor, but they are noticeable when a player is used to better physics in games like Yoshi's Island or Super Metroid.  

I've always thought of Donkey Kong Country as an above-average platformer series, and Returns didn't change that.  The game has a lot of cool stage designs and some neat aspects going for it, but it's harmed by nonsensical control scheme choices and some lame boss sections.  I enjoyed playing the game, but didn't feel like putting in extra time to play all of its secret stages.  I will recommend it to platformer fans, but it's no masterpiece; just a good game to play if you don't mind a little (okay, lot of) stress.

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