Donkey Kong Bananza – Gaming Nexus

There is something primal in every human child that wants to smash stuff. My two-year-old daughter delights in making other family members build elaborate castles out of Magna tiles and dominoes just so she can go stomping through the room like a miniature kaiju, crushing our deliberately made structures and howling with laughter. It is this childish need to destroy that makes it fun to watch characters like the Hulk tear a turret off a tank and throw it at a helicopter. It is likewise this same impulse for destruction that Nintendo has tapped into so effectively with Donkey Kong Bananza.

Whether you are a child or an adult, it’s always fun to break stuff in video games, from whacking the generic crates found in JRPGs to taking a pickaxe to Minecraft’s beautiful voxel mountains. But I can’t recall another game that makes the act of wonton destruction as satisfying as Donkey Kong Bananza. Every aspect of the game is finely tuned to make destroying it uniquely delightful, from the crunchy sound effects to the way the various materials break into smaller chunks you can throw around in a flowing fit of monkey demolition. One of Bananza’s purest delights is the moment you drop into a pristine level from above, the gorgeous sight of the unspoiled landscape activating the salivating anticipation of laying waste to its meticulous rolling hills and splendor.

Unlike Mario, who navigates games with light-footed precision, Donkey Kong enters the game as a wrecking ball. Beyond the amazing feeling of power DK Bananza gives the player with the insane ability to smash a network of tunnels through its levels, Nintendo has found countless ingenious ways to convert crushing stuff into actual gameplay. Like the recent Zelda games, Nintendo allows players to break the game any way they want to achieve their goals, giving permission for smashing stuff to be a solution to problems, puzzles, and boss fights.

As a simple example, in one early challenge I was faced with a series of lasers, rotating from a central point on a round platform. I had to get from one side of the room to the other without letting the constantly-moving lasers fry me. I could jump over the lower lasers, but it seemed as though some of the others were too tall for me to manage. Then it hit me, and I laughed out loud. I just smashed the ground out and burrowed my way under the lasers. Problem solved.

This ability to seemingly break the game gives the player the feeling that they are getting over on Nintendo in some way, though in reality Bananza is designed to give players freedom to do whatever they want, confident that whatever solution they come up with will be both satisfying and fun. It is absolutely hysterical to blow through one of Nintendo’s meticulous and beautifully designed boss fights in 10 seconds by throwing explosive rocks at the boss. It turns player expectations on their ear, and it’s fun to think about how the designers at Nintendo know you can do this, and allow it.

In fact, these levels are so carefully and brilliantly designed that you can literally smash every bit of crushable material from them, leaving just the bones, containers, and connective material, and still beat the level. There is always a way out of any hole you dig yourself into, always an escape hatch, a ladder, a minecart, or a plain old fast travel point. Gates and fences on the gameplay are provided, they are just so loose that they don’t even come close to chaffing.

All of this jumping and smashing is in service of the game’s story, which is light and fun, and just fleshed out enough that it doesn’t immediately leak out your ear. Donkey Kong is chilling on Ingot Isle, looking for Banandium Gems, which are crystal bananas. Bad guys come and steal the bananas, dropping DK into an underground chamber. It is revealed that DK’s world is made of layers, each of which counts as one of Bananza’s very open levels. Accompanied by the teenage singer Pauline, DK determines that he has to get to the core of the planet to get back to the top (just go with it).

So that’s it. Clobber your way to the center of the planet, recover as many bananas as you can, beat up bad guys (which only becomes even mildly difficult towards the end of the game), hang out with Pauline, find secrets, solve puzzles. The story absolutely does not matter, but it does provide occasional moments of breezy comedy.

It feels like a disservice to call these individual world layers “levels”, as they are each sprawling mini-open worlds in their own right. Each layer of the planet is stuffed to the gills with puzzles, navigation challenges, combat challenges, secret chambers, side-quests, and goofball interactions with NPCs, along with the actual activities needed to beat the level. It is entirely possible to go directly to the layer’s waypoints and quickly beat the objectives. But I would contend that anyone moving quickly from level to level has a dead heart and does not enjoy fun. There is simply too much great stuff to find to run a beeline through the game.

Much like their other games, the gang at Nintendo EPD find ingenious ways to draw the proverbial horse to water. The ground and walls in any given area are littered with little glowing patches, or small veins of gold that tease the fact that something much greater lies beneath the surface. And then, of course, there are the discoveries that you can make that come as complete surprises; the rooms you come across while you are tunneling through earth for the sheer fun of it, which contain portals to secret mini-levels, which give rewards that advance your ability to find more. And round and round you go on the Nintendo Ferris wheel of fun.

To engage with all of this content (and to collect all the accompanying goodies), Donkey Kong has a number of moves that can be unlocked. In addition to his standard “punch in every direction”, DK can rip pieces off of almost any texture, and then aim and hurl them towards distant targets. He can also hop on them and use them for platforms for a double jump, or quickly skitter across the landscape, riding the rock chunks as they chip away beneath him. Slapping the ground also reveals the location of nearby secrets and hidden objects, which – combined with Pauline’s ability to path-find through song – can keep the player scurrying around for hours in each sub-layer.

There are also super-Kong forms DK can take, which are unlocked over the course of the game and activated by powering up a meter with found gold. Gold is almost everywhere, so energetic players could feasibly spend most of the game stringing together power-up transformations in an endless chain. Each of these transformations gives the player special abilities – everything from flight to the ability to eat and spit giant chunks of materials at a rapid pace. The ability to rampage around with each of these forms just adds a deeper layer of interactivity to the world and puzzles (as well as providing even more ways to cheat/smash your way through them).

All of these abilities and transformations can be enhanced by skill points, which are unlocked by finding hidden banana gems, which are simply everywhere. When DK finds a banana gem, he utters a guttural “Ummm! Banana!”. I swear, at times when playing, I was getting an “Ummm! Banana!” out of him every 90 seconds or so.

There are a ton of other fun features worth exploring – too many to mention in a review – from the awesome interactive 3D map to the fun multiplayer mode that allowed my kids to basically shoot a bazooka from Pauline, causing massive environmental damage with abandon. There is gear to buy that enhances your abilities, and fun collectables that will save you when you fall off a ledge, and portable bedrooms you can build that enhance your maximum health. It goes on and on; this game is huge.

But the real takeaway here is that Nintendo took a primal, seemingly simple mechanic – the ability to smash your environment – and built an enormous, varied, and deeply fun game out of it. If you had any doubts about whether or not Switch 2 would continue to offer the sort of ridiculously great experiences that Nintendo is known for, you can lay those fears to rest. Donkey Kong just knocked down the last walls of doubt, and he’s cheerfully bouncing in front of you, waiting for you to engage. Ummm Banana, this one is a classic.