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 reveal their secrets.
And there’s tons of secrets. Almost all levels have the letters K-O-N-G to collect, and a bunch of puzzle pieces that are hidden behind scenery or in bonus areas. It will take a good deal of hunting to find them all, the rewards being some extra challenging levels, or things like gallery art, music and other extras.
Grab a DK barrel and Diddy can join in, hopping onto DK’s back to provide you with a second batch of hit points and boost your jumping with a jet pack. Alternatively, Diddy is player 2 in co-op, keeping that jet pack jump separate and having a pop gun in place of DK’s ground pound. This can actually lead to the game being quite a bit more challenging, since you don’t have both players with the expanded movement of Diddy’s jet pack.
Donkey Kong Country Returns is renowned for being a challenging platformer, and that absolutely holds true. Though it’s moderately forgiving by giving you multiple hit points, and there’s usually a couple of checkpoints and lives are plentiful, the mine kart and rocket barrel levels are all insta-kill stages that can become quite frustrating through trial and error.
Everything brought to the game with the Nintendo 3DS port is brought forward to Nintendo Switch, so for the game difficulty you have a choice of “modern” mode with three hearts per ape and “original” mode with two, and you have more flexibility with buying things from Cranky Kong’s shop and equipping them in the inventory. Across both modes, multiple deaths eventually see you offered the help of Super Kong, which will have an AI play through the level for you, though you forego any of the things he collects.
Visually, this looks pretty much like you would expect it to. If you didn’t go back and look at comparisons, you’d happily assume that it’s just the game on Wii running at a higher resolution. The art direction absolutely holds up to this day – the silhouetted levels really stand out as a stylistic treat – though it does feel of its era in some ways and DK definitely isn’t as lusciously hairy as he is in Tropical Freeze. Curiously, catching a few comparison videos, it does seem as though the Switch visuals are a tad more muted, with lighting highlights having a cooler tone to the more golden hues of the original. It’s a cleaner looks to the game, that’s for sure.