Donkey Kong Country Returns HD Review
The next big thing could be announced or revealed pretty much any day now, but there’s still a last few jobs to finish while the Nintendo Switch remains Nintendo’s latest and greatest. Among them is putting the final pieces of the puzzle in place for the Donkey Kong series, uniting the whole franchise on one platform. The early port of Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze was joined in 2020 by the SNES trilogy on Nintendo Switch Online, while the tail end of 2024 saw the Game Boy’s Donkey Kong Land trilogy added, and now Donkey Kong Country Returns HD is putting the penultimate piece of the puzzle in place. Really, the only game left to reunite the whole simian platforming family on Switch is Donkey Kong 64.
Donkey Kong Country Returns is one of the best platformers of the Wii era. The two Super Mario Galaxy games were exceptional, of course, but we were also a few years on from Nintendo’s return to side-scrollers with New Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo DS, jumping to Wii in 2009. Donkey Kong Country Returns was born out of Retro Studios’ love of Rare’s trilogy, looking to bring the same kind of ethos to a new generation, and it was a huge success.
DK and Diddy wake up one day to find their massive horde of bananas stolen by the Tiki Tak Tribe, the pair of them chase after them through the various distinct areas of Donkey Kong Island, from jungle to beach, from cliff faces to… a whole factory zone? It’s the fairly standard set-up with a clutch of levels within each area and you have to make a path through them (each area having multiple paths and an unlockable route) to a boss that’s been hypnotised and powered up by the Tiki Tak Tribe.
The platforming itself is inherently familiar, as you run and jump from left to right, though it has some DK-specific tweaks. Ground pounding can stun nearby enemies or interact with the world, some enemies need you to roll through them, and there’s a whimsical way that you can stop and blow at dandelion heads and propeller flowers to
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