While watching the big Nintendo Switch 2 Direct, I’m sure I wasn’t alone in expecting the long-awaited follow-up to Super Mario Odyssey. When the final trailer kicked off with lush, cartoony environs, it seemed clear that the expectation was about to become reality. But nope, Nintendo’s big surprise game was actually Donkey Kong Bananza, a new 3D adventure game starring the king of the Kongs.
But is this just a palette swap? Maybe the developers wanted to make a new 3D platformer, but to mix it up they slotted in Donkey Kong instead of Mario. Effectively, is this the sequel to Mario Odyssey we’ve been waiting for?
After having spent 30 minutes playing the game at Nintendo’s press event Wednesday, I can say that Donkey Kong Bananza might be the most “fuck everything up” game Nintendo has ever made. Seconds into controlling Donkey Kong, I was set loose in a mine staffed by very sad chimpanzees. And no, I wasn’t there to save them. Apparently this next generation of DK is very obsessed with Bananium, a mineral that looks a heck of a lot like gold and I guess tastes like bananas.
The gameplay consists of Donkey Kong just sprinting through the mine breaking literally everything around him. He’s busting holes in walls, he’s throwing huge boulders — he’s a very mobile, very hungry wrecking ball. There was very little platforming involved, in fact, with much more of a focus on wrecking shit. Every button and trigger but one results in some wrecking-shit variant. There’s the standard horizontal punch, there’s a ground slam, there’s a ground drum (for sending nearby pickups into the air for collection), there’s a grab and throw for hurling boulders. You are just marching around the environments fucking shit up.
This can feel a bit chaotic — and actually resulted in some motion sickness, requiring me to turn down some of the sensitivity settings — but it was a blast. The meditative platforming you might find in a Mario game has been replaced by something entirely different, and entirely in line with Donkey Kong’s persona. Dude loves bananas and wrecking shit.
The game does have some purpose to it. Sometimes you are given mini objectives to keep things moving, like using exploding boulders to open up new pathways. And there are a ton of collectibles hidden within the walls and underground to uncover. The levels appear to be quite large and seemingly filled with a number of different paths you can go down, making Bananza feel much more in line with what you’d expect from a major first-party Nintendo release. But all of that felt secondary to the pure joy of destroying the world around me.
I cleared out a particularly gold-filled area, only to look back on the chaos I had wrought. It was like a tornado had whipped through the heart of the mine, and no one was spared.
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