I missed out on Donkey Kong Country Returns when it came out on the Wii. I don’t know what was coming out around that time that sidetracked me from it, but for whatever reason I never got a chance to play it. I did goof off with it at a friend’s house a while after its release, and I was surprised at how unimpressed I was with it. I was playing it while he was trying to coax a hard drive back to life, so I thought that I might not have been in much of a mood to enjoy the game. With that in mind I was extremely excited at a second chance to play Donkey Kong Country Returns (DKCR), and on the road no less. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to like it as much as anyone else does. It does some impressive work with its level design and it can be challenging, but I can’t help but feel that this release is lacking.
I really wanted to be blown away by this game. The level design does its best to carry the game, that’s for sure. The level of interaction with the levels is just short of providing a level editor in the game, as it felt like everything I was doing had some effect on the environment. Huge pillars would tip as I walked over them, cannon barrels would fire me through sections of the wall and destroy massive statues, the sea would come crashing over me as I ducked behind a rock, and cannonballs would rain down on the ship I was on and tear it to pieces. The amount of stuff going on during the levels makes every step feel full of purpose, and I couldn’t shake the sensation like I was playing through an entire island full of Indiana Jones-style traps and locations. The level design was just top notch, and anyone looking to create a platformer needs to use this game as a reference point.
That same level design can be extremely cruel when it likes. If you’ve ever played a Donkey Kong Country game before, you know that you will be spending a lot of your day timing shots out of cannon barrels. If you haven’t played one, you often climb into barrels that you can shoot yourself out of with the touch of a button; having to fire yourself into yet another barrel. It starts easy, but after a while you’ll have to dodge moving enemies while also timing your shot to land into a moving target. Considering a single misfire means repeating at least half the level (usually the hard half, too), it makes for some stressful shots.
DKCR has lots of these spots, but you will also have to fire into the background in some areas, and with a time limit in others. The game thankfully doesn’t have a timer in most areas so you can take your time with the more difficult jumps and shots, but sometimes you will have to make the shot before your barrel is destroyed. In others, you’ll have to time your shot with an object moving in the background; something that’s a lot harder than lining up a shot on a 2D plane. It added some nice variety to shooting yourself out of a barrel, and whole new ways for the game to make you want to smash your 3DS.
I played the original Donkey Kong Country a few days before DKCR to refresh my memory on the controls, and those looking for something similar may notice a subtle change. Donkey Kong’s movement in DKCR is a little weirder than it used to be, as the d-pad really didn’t have as much play in its movement styles. You were either moving forward or not with the d-pad, but with the analog stick on the 3DS there are far more ranges of movement; shifting from creeping to walking to running depending on how hard you’re pushing the stick. It’s a small thing, but one that makes big differences in how you play the game if you’re used to its predecessors.
The issue this creates is that it often felt like I had to build up momentum to run at times when I really needed Donkey Kong to get moving, and in others it was hard to get him to stop when he was going full tilt. This momentum issue also screwed up a lot of my jumps, meaning I didn’t jump far enough or leapt too far because I wasn’t going the speed I wanted to be. This resulted in me having a harder time in areas than I felt like I should have because of the more nuanced movement. I got used to it after a while and could deal with it, but it still felt like it only added trouble instead of making control more interesting.
The main way I dealt with it was through using Diddy Kong. Instead of being a side character who was lighter on his feet, he attaches to Donkey Kong’s back and lets him float for a few seconds during a jump. I used him as much as I could, because it eliminates the imprecise jumping and lets the player control it a whole lot better. I could actually control my landings with Diddy, so I found the game got a lot easier to play when I had his help. It felt like his abilities were dictated by the annoyances from the controls, though, so I would have rather seen a control scheme that was closer to that of the original games if they were going to have to fix it like this. Given that most modern Mario games have this similar slippery control style and that they fix the problem by adding a power that lets players glide, I can’t help but feel that this is just how Nintendo platformers are going to work now. I don’t like it, but that’s how it is.
Adding to the difficulty is the same issue I had with Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Mirror of Fate: dodgy hit detection. This time, it’s the enemies that can be hard to hit, as you have to land pretty much right on their center of mass to do damage. Combining this with the weird momentum in jumps and you might find yourself taking a lot more hits than you mean to. I just found that if my jumps skewed a little bit more toward the front or end of an enemy that I’d end up being the one to take a hit instead of the creature. It’s another issue that can be dealt with by practice, but it still felt cheap that I was landing on top of enemy heads with a jump but that the game would register damage on my character instead of the creature. Be very specific with your jumps in DKCR, as the game only accepts a very clean hit as damaging an enemy.
Another issue I had with the controls was in many of the game’s basic moves. The Y button does almost everything in the game; combining the ground pound, roll, and blowing a puff of air in one button. It’s context sensitive, so you’ll only roll when moving, ground pound when standing still, and blow some air while ducking. While it’s nice that the button gets a lot of use, it means that Donkey Kong doesn’t always do what you want him to. There were a lot of times when a roll would have saved me a hit or helped me land a jump, but I couldn’t use it as I was standing still. There are times when I needed to roll from a dead stop, but would do a ground pound, or worse, blow air. The ground pound still hurts most of the enemies, but it takes a half second to wind up before registering damage and the roll wouldn’t. Again, I end up taking hits when I should be hitting the enemy.
The roll also doesn’t regain all of its momentum with every hit any more. In the older Donkey Kong Country games if you rolled into an enemy you would essentially start the roll all over again, moving faster with each hit. You can keep a roll moving in this game so long as you have Diddy and keep hitting the button, but why do I have to do that? There were so many times where a constant roll would have not only worked better, but would have been the best possible thing to do given the way the enemies were placed. I don’t know why it’s been overcomplicated like this. I really sound like I’m pining for the old game by this point, but the old control scheme was more flexible and easier to control than this new one. Why change it? Also, why can’t I control my jump when I do a rolling jump anymore? Why does this game hate the precise controls of its predecessor?
All of these control gripes add up to a game that is hard, but not hard for a good reason. The Donkey Kong Country games that this one is inspired by had solid controls that were easy to use, and because of that the game expected you to be able to use them flawlessly. In DKCR, you’re given difficult situations that are made more difficult by complex controls that aren’t mapped to specific buttons. Things are made challenging that don’t need to be, so you take a lot of hits. I’d argue that this game could have worked with Donkey Kong only being able to take a single hit if the controls worked better and the hit detection was improved, but instead you have a game that’s hard because it wasn’t properly tested. Instead, the developers made it possible to take another hit for each character and called it a day. Adding a third hit for those who want to play the 3DS’ new mode doesn’t change the fact that the controls still don’t work that well. The challenge is still unfair.
Beyond controls, I’m just not feeling a lot of the enemy designs either. The tiki head masks do make for a goofy, fitting enemy in the Donkey Kong universe, but there’s just not a lot to them. They’re kind of cartoony, but that’s it. The rest of the enemies are far worse, looking like ugly little masses of polygons. I really wasn’t impressed by the crab designs, and many of the other enemies look like plain, boring wildlife. The birds had a lot of detail on them (as did the bomb-throwing bird boss), but beyond them the creatures just don’t look that great. It’s funny considering how stylized many of the backgrounds and levels were in the game, but I found enemy design was just lacking. I really don’t like 3D artwork on the 3DS most of the time, though. At least I didn’t have to see it as close up as Mirror of Fate, I guess.
Which brings me to another issue with the art design: why is everything so small on my screen? As much as I loved the interactivity of the levels, it came at the cost of the enemies and characters. This is a game that was built for regular sized televisions to begin with, so I can see the big backgrounds not being an issue. On a 30-40 inch screen, Donkey Kong and his enemies wouldn’t be small, and you’d have an easier time telling where damage boxes and enemy defenses were. On the 3DS screen, it’s hard to see that a crab’s claws are sticking to the side and will damage you if you roll into them. Important things you need to know about combat are just too hard to see on the small screen; sacrificed so level detail remains intact. I do love the levels and how they look, but the cost to my enjoyment of the game wasn’t worth it.
As for the music, DKCR went for the hat trick and didn’t do a great job on that either. All of the tracks just feel like weaker versions of the stuff that came from Donkey Kong Country. For all of the raving I’ve seen in reviews of the Wii version I was hoping for some nice remixes, but it didn’t cut it. I tend to enjoy high quality remixes of old game tracks, and the original tracks in this series haven’t seen much love from remixers so I was hoping for some strong stuff. All of it came out weaker than its predecessors, and the new music just didn’t do all that much for me. It has a nice island feel to it most of the time, but it sounds like the simple tracks you’d find in some generic CD of ‘Island Music’.
The level design tells me that the developers had some great ideas, but I really wish they had transferred over to the controls, enemy design, and music. The game is a nice one to watch and I’m sure there are some great videos of it out there, but I really didn’t enjoy playing this one as much as I could. The issues with the controls were all small, but as the game gets harder the excuses for those problems wears pretty thin. In a game that asks its players to be extremely precise, we need precise controls. It created an unfair feeling of difficulty in a game that was already challenging, and soured the entire experience for me. I think the developers, Monster Games Inc, has a good handle on the series and can do a better job in the future, but right now this is a frustrating game that falls far short of the legacy it’s trying to build on.
Final image courtesy of venturebeat.com.
