Where to start? This game was incredible! I ended the game with just over 500 of the 777 bananas to collect. There were plenty of them that were just "dig terrain, find banana" but the majority were found in bonus levels or in the main world with unique challenges. There were a lot of those challenges that repeated a similar theme, such as "collect all the puzzle pieces" but they all had their own twists to help them feel like they belonged in the current level you were playing or for a specific transformation.

Speaking of the transformations, they were all super unique and really fun! Definitely weird seeing Donkey Kong turn into all these Sub-Saharan animals, but they all had abilities that completely transformed the way you play the game. The only real exception to that was the Kong transformation, which is basically just "DK but stronger." That one being so simple is a great introduction to the transformations, though, and it is one I found myself using the most often because of how it compliments the game's main gameplay loop.

Which is, of course, terrain destruction and manipulation. This is a platformer through and through, and most of the other transformations certainly compliment that aspect, but Kong and one other one play into the terrain stuff perfectly. It is way more fun than I thought it would be to blast your way through terrain, especially because a lot of it isn't just for show... all of the different terrain types have different properties that will interact with other terrain types and various other gadgets/gizmos differently. They get really creative with the terrain in the later levels, too!

The amazing thing about this game as opposed to, admittedly, a lot of other Nintendo titles is that every single collectible is meaningful. You aren't just collecting things to collect them. It's really FUN to collect them, which certainly helps push you to always be on the hunt for more (and that hunt is extremely well paced, too!), you are collecting things because they meaningfully play into the game's "economy."

Banana gems give you skill points, which let you unlock more things that DK can do with and without the Bananza transformations. Banana chips can be accumulated and then traded for banana gems. Each level (called layers) have their own unique fossils, and you can use those fossils to unlock new outfits and accessories which also give you extra benefits. The last collectible is gold, which you can use to buy things like power-ups, unlock shortcuts, and open up little safehouses where you can sleep and get some temporary bonus hearts depending on how many safehouses you have on a layer.

When you're sleeping in those safehouses, Pauline will wake up DK and have a little bit of cute dialogue. I always found what she had to say pretty charming. Pauline is a fantastic addition to the game and a super adorable companion character. It's great to see moments where DK cares about her almost as much as he cares about bananas! Really though, I loved both characters, they were super charming throughout the whole game, as was pretty much the whole cast!

The story is simple and sweet. Nothing too crazy, but it didn't really need to be anything crazy. I still don't know exactly where on the "timeline" it is supposed to be... it kind of hints at it being both pre and post Odyssey so I'm not really certain. To be honest, I don't really care though! Unlike Zelda, the story of Mario and Donkey Kong has never been something I think the vast majority of people have cared much about, including myself. As long as it is serviceable to get you from point A to point B, it's good enough! It even has a little bit of a post-game story that is a lot more simple, but fun nonetheless.

There are a couple of weak spots for the game that prevent it from getting a perfect score for me. For one, the frame rate is at a solid 60 FPS most of the time but usually drops whenever lots of voxels are being spawned in or destroyed at a quick rate. It wasn't anything that harmed my enjoyment of the game, but it was certainly noticeable. The second thing is that, by and large, the game is extremely easy. There are challenging moments to be had, namely the final boss fight and some of the post-game challenges, but I only had one game over and it was during that final boss fight. I think the difficulty was tuned mostly for a general audience because that's the kind of audience that is playing the game, but there does exist an easier difficulty so I was expecting at least some resistance.

Overall, I expect this game to win some Game of the Year awards and maybe even a couple soundtrack ones as well. It is heaps and bounds better than Mario Kart World, and I can only imagine MKW is priced the way it is and was the launch title for the Switch 2 solely because MK8DX is Nintendo's highest selling game of all time. Even still, I'm surprised that DK Bananza wasn't the game Nintendo tried to schmooze their way into the $80 price point with. It is better than MKW in literally every way except maybe the soundtrack. It feels like an actual, full fledged game instead of something a bit closer to a glorified cash grab, by Nintendo's quality standards.

I don't think it's going to beat out something like Expedition 33 for the vast majority of people who would be voting for game awards in the first place, and I can't really say if that's fair or not because I haven't played the competition. I do, however, think that just by way of the amount of people who can actually play E33 versus DK Bananza, due to it being on everything but Switch 2 while the opposite is true for Bananza, means that E33 is probably going to have a bit more of a cultural effect on the gaming landscape as a whole. Bananza is a great game, a brilliant one at that, but it is limited by its platform and potentially the fact that it really is a game for general audiences and not a more mature kind of gamer.

Anyway, awesome game. Took just over 30 hours to beat so that's a pretty long game in my book! I had a great time with the whole way through. Towards the end I was getting a little bit antsy just because I want to play other games, but that doesn't mean I wasn't still having fun. If you haven't bought a Switch 2 yet, hopefully by like next year there will be a decent amount of games for it and it will be more worth your cash to pick up. This one is a MUST PLAY whenever you do so.

#beardgamereview