"Is this really the best you can do Nintendo???"

As you probably know Donkey Konga is a rhythm game that uses a drum controller. It could be called Nintendo's comeback to DDR but that would mean Nintendo sucks! It's not that this is an awful game but it has a decent amount of problems.

Controls/controller: 10/10
Obviously one of the most important parts of any rhythm game is how good the controller is, because a bad controller can ruin the game. Thankfully Donkey Konga has a great controller. It's a bongo drum with a left and right drum and a clap sensor. The clap sensor works great and will register even the quietest clap. It will also register other things such as singing and hitting the side of the drum but I won't deduct points for that since clapping after a few minutes can really hurt your hands. The drum itself is well made and can take a beating as well as register all of your hits.

Song Selection: 4/10
This is a huge problem with Donkey Konga. It has a really short song list (33 songs) and a lot of the songs are really crappy (who really wants to play Hungarian Dance No. 5 in G Minor, or Turkish March, or Bingo?). Then the few songs that could have been good, like All the Small Things were done by cover-up artists so they suck to. The only reason I gave this game a 4/10 in song selection is because of a few Nintendo songs like DK Rap, Mario Bros. Theme, The Legend of Zelda Theme, and the Donkey Konga Theme. This song selection is so bad that it had me playing the Pokemon Theme because it was a good song compared to some of the other songs (I'm not joking). This is just pitiful when you look at the huge song list of DDR with the songs done by their original artists (I think).

Gameplay: 9/10
It's sort of hard to score this and song selection separately since the songs make a difference of whether you'll want to play the game or not. But I described song selection before so here I'm judging based on the game regardless of how good or bad the songs are.
This game is very fun and simple. All you do is hit Bongo drums to the rhythm of a song. The commands are yellow half colored circle (the left half of the circle is colored) for the left drum, same thing for the right drum but the right half of the circle is red, and then there's a full colored purple circle to hit both drums at once. There's also a blue star for a clap. There are also drum rolls for just the left drum, right drum, and for both drums, there is also a thing where you clap a lot that's like a drum roll. The difficulty level is fairly low but you'll still have a good time beating on the bongos.

Graphics: 0/10
This game has N64 quality graphics, Nintendo put no effort into the graphics of this game.

Overall:6/10
This game isn't awful but it could have been so much better. Nintendo could have put in more songs and had harder difficulties. They could have used the original artists for the few songs they had. And they could have spent at least a little time on graphics. Though beating on the drums is very fun the experience is ruined by the games many flaws. This game isn't as terrible as I made it sound though, beating on the drums is a very fun experience, so if you're still interested in this game and don't mind the small song selection I'd say buy it. But if you have another rhythm game or just aren't that interested in beating on drums I'd say this game isn't worth buying.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 11/21/04