Donkey Kong Country

"One banana at a time"

Rare has garnered plenty of video game fame over the years due to releasing some of the highest quality titles we have ever seen. GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64 is easily one of the most influential first-person shooters of all time and has some of the best multiplayer ever. Conker's Bad Fur Day is equally as good and is one of my favorite games of all time. Rare's repertoire goes well beyond those two titles though. Banjo-Kazooie, Kameo: Elements of Power, and Viva Pinata are all exceptional titles, but all of these games were released on the Nintendo 64 and beyond. What was Rare doing before the fifth generation anyway? Well, they were crafting masterpieces like Donkey Kong Country to lay the foundation of their soon to be legendary video game career.

Donkey Kong Country, starring Nintendo's famous characters, is quite simply one of the best platformers around, and a collection of SNES games without it just isn't complete. The game is filled with imaginative gameplay mechanics supplemented by a unique art style that helps it stand out from all the other 2D platformers released for the SNES, but the game isn't without its flaws.

One of the first flaws is that some of these mechanics, like riding animals, doesn't expand enough. The first half of the game uses the animals much more than the second half of the game. I would really have loved to use these creatures more, but Rare, for some reason or another, sort of forgot about them in the middle of the game. Don't get me wrong, they still show up but not nearly enough to be even relevant.

Another problem with the animals is that trying to go through the game's platforming segments riding them is nearly impossible. The frog jumps way too far and the rhino is so large that he barely even fits on half of the platforms in the game. The ostrich is a little better in this department as you can glide with it to get over gaps.

You find these animals in large crates scattered throughout the levels, and like the ostrich's flying ability, they all have their own powers. The frog can jump pretty high and far, making it much easier to dodge obstacles while the rhino can plow through all of the enemies that get in his way. There is a parrot in the game whose only purpose is to shine a flashlight during a few levels, but there's also a swordfish that you can ride during underwater levels to give you the ability to actually kill your enemies.

Like I said, I liked the concept of riding around on different animals and it brings some freshness to the game, but the actual levels are filled with much more variety than this. Almost every level feels wildly different than the one before and they all take advantage of their own gameplay mechanics, tailored for those specific levels.

Some levels will have you riding a platform and collecting oil for it before it falls into the bottomless pits while other levels have you riding in a mine cart. Its these little parts of the game that truly make it stand out from other titles as it never gets repetitive and it never gets old.

Donkey Kong Country's main gameplay mechanic though, and one that recurs throughout most of the levels, is swinging on ropes. Some of the game's most thrilling moments are during these rope segments, and I couldn't imagine the title without them.

When you start the game, you have three choices of game you want to play. You can play by yourself, you can play cooperatively, or you can play against your teammate. Each type of game offers the basic same experience though and it puzzles me why these options were even thrown in here. Co-op is the exact same as playing by yourself, except you don't have to pass the controller back and forth, and going against each other is the same as well except you each are trying to earn the most points and stay alive longer.

Unlike Mario where you gain power-ups to work sort of like your extra hit points, the way you make sure you aren't getting killed with one hit in Donkey Kong Country is by having Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, and an animal with you. If you are riding an animal and are struck, you lose that animal, and if you are hit with either Donkey Kong or Diddy Kong, you lose that respective Kong.

In order to gain the Kong you lost back, you have to find them in barrels (you know, monkeys in a barrel?). You can throw these barrels to take down enemies or just throw them at the ground to release your friend. There are other kinds of barrels as well including barrels that spout an endless stream of enemies, explosive TNT barrels and even metal barrels that you can ride on.

Another awesome gameplay mechanic in Donkey Kong Country is the barrels that you can shoot around in. You jump into a barrel, and immediately you are tasked with performing some death defying blasts to get across the level. These moments are indescribably awesome and make Donkey Kong Country as great as it is.

Platformers just wouldn't be platformers if there wasn't stuff floating around for you to collect, and Donkey Kong Country has plenty of that to go around. There are bananas everywhere for you to pick up, and they work exactly like coins do in Mario. If you collect 100, you earn an extra life. You can also pick up golden letters that eventually spell “KONG”, and this will also reward you an extra life. Red balloons with Donkey Kong's face on them can also be collected for a free life, but these only show up on very rare occasions.

Golden replicas of the animals you can ride can also be found, and by finding all three of these, you are sent to a mini-game of sorts. In this mini-game, you must be the animal and go back and forth under a time limit, collecting thousands of mini-golden replicas of yourself. For every one hundred you get, you earn a—you guessed it—free life.

Hidden areas are plentiful in Donkey Kong Country and I can guarantee that almost every time you play a level, you'll find something you didn't before. Some areas of the ground can reveal secret things like tires to bounce on in order to reach previously unattainable areas while you can throw barrels at certain walls to reveal hidden secrets. Not revolutionary but still cool.

Just like Super Mario World, you traverse an overworld map to get to each level, fight a boss, and then go on to the next area. You can visit the homes of a few other Kongs though, including Candy Kong, Funky Kong, and Cranky Kong. Candy Kong is a save point, Funky Kong is an airplane service, and Cranky Kong tells you cryptic secrets to help you find secrets within the game. Candy makes the game a lot less frustrating than Super Mario World because you can save after almost every level, meaning that instead of repeating levels that you already know you can do greatly, you can focus on the level that's giving you trouble and better hone your platforming abilities in Donkey Kong Country.

Unless you are playing cooperatively, you can freely switch between Diddy Kong and Donkey Kong most of the time. Unfortunately, this isn't always as responsive as you'd like and at moments when you have to make a quick decision, it can easily cost you a life.

Donkey Kong is much more suitable for most of the game than Diddy Kong as Diddy Kong sometimes has to cartwheel to kill certain enemies while Donkey Kong can just jump on top of them. Because of this, portions of the game are nigh impossible without Donkey Kong alive.

Being a platformer from the SNES days, you really can't expect there to be an awesome story from Donkey Kong Country or anything, but it's neat how this game connects with the original Donkey Kong arcade games in very minor ways. The original Donkey Kong, now Cranky Kong, is an old man, and Donkey Kong Jr. is now formally known as Donkey Kong. These three, along with some other friends and family, all live on their very own island with a giant hoard of bananas. However, King K. Rool, an evil Kremling, shows up with his army and takes over the island, in the process stealing all of the bananas. Cranky Kong sends Donkey Kong and the younger Kong, Diddy Kong, to repel the Kremling menace and return all of the bananas. Like I said, it isn't a revolutionary plot or anything, but it gets the job done and provides a reason for why you're doing what you're doing in the game.

At the beginning of this review, I commented on Donkey Kong Country's amazing art style, and I wasn't lying. The levels and environments are composed of pre-rendered visuals, similarly to Resident Evil, but the characters are rendered on the screen in a semi-3D effect. This was revolutionary during the SNES days, and it doesn't hurt things any that the animation is flawless. There are some graphical mishaps and technical problems occasionally, but overall, Donkey Kong Country is one of the best looking games on the SNES.

While it doesn't have quite the pedigree as Mario does, Donkey Kong Country does manage to provide a pretty memorable soundtrack. The music is nice and by this point, a classic composition of video game music. The sound effects are neat and give the game its charm. To go along with its inventive platforming and gorgeous graphics, it seems that Donkey Kong Country's audio is also pretty much perfect.

The first time you play through Super Mario World, it may take you a decent amount of time to get to beat the game. With Donkey Kong Country though, you can easily beat the game in two hours, and if you are a skilled player, much less than that. That's not necessarily a bad thing because Donkey Kong Country does provide a stiff challenge, but it's still sad that there's not enough content to span more than two hours. There is about two more hours of playtime after you beat the game in order to get 100% and unlock everything there is in the game, but Donkey Kong Country isn't nearly as user-friendly as Super Mario World, making this task daunting and not nearly as fun as it should be to achieve.

Donkey Kong Country is a classic and it's even more proof that Rare is one of the greatest video game developers of all time. With first-person shooters like GoldenEye 007, adventure titles like Kameo: Elements of Power, 3D platformers like Conker's Bad Fur Day, life-simulation games like Viva Pinata, and 2D platformers like Donkey Kong Country, Rare's legacy is forever etched in the video game hall of fame.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 12/09/08

Game Release: Donkey Kong Country (US, 11/25/94)