On the other hand, from the presentational elements of the game, including the art style, it’s something that’s clearly been designed for the younger player – even in comparison to other Donkey Kong Country titles. On the one hand, it has clearly been designed to be challenging, between the level design itself and the lengthy, complex patterns of the boss battles. I would have thought that if a player is struggling, making it slightly easier for them would have been a more accessible approach.ĭonkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze has an odd tone when it comes to difficulty. So to then lose the abilities of your assistant means that the level gets even more difficult. If you lose your buddy and are left with just Donkey Kong, that means you’re probably struggling. Thanks to that improved approach to design, the game won’t frustrate as the older Donkey Kong Country titles can, so it’s all the charm of nostalgia without any of the pain.Īnd that’s where Tropical Freeze has its counter-intuitive moment. This is especially true when you run into the minecart levels and similar references back to the original trilogy, because for many reasons (not many of them good) the mine cart levels were the epitome of the Donkey Kong Country experience. Backed by a lovely soundtrack by David Wise, the game has those retro notes that will appeal to traditional fans of the Donkey Kong Country games. Tropical Freeze benefits from tight, accurate, and precise controls, and a level design that is challenging, while also offering just enough give that you don’t need to be quite pixel perfect about it. There’s still an obsession with secrets and collectibles, and I really do wish platformers would get rid of these damn Easter Egg hunts (in this game you’re looking for puzzle pieces), but at least most of them are hidden in such a way that careful investigation, rather than arbitrary risk taking, will help you track them all down. Tropical Freeze smooths over most of that. It was the most irritating approach to hiding secrets in a game I had ever played, and to make matters worse, the trial-and-error process was drawn out to a ridiculous level, because on top of everything else, levels were overly long and overloaded with places that secrets might be. Not so much the basic platforming, but the need to fall off every cliff along the way in the hope of finding a barrel or similar that would inch you closer to that 100 per cent completion. Anyone who remembers playing those old Donkey Kong Country SNES titles will remember all-too-well just how horrible the level design was. There is one new feature that is exclusive to the Switch – and I’ll get to them later on in the review, but it doesn’t add anything to the game for existing fans of Donkey Kong titles.īut putting all of that aside, the game itself is a rather lovely platformer that straddles the line between staying true to the original titles, and adding enough modern stuff to get rid of the irritations. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask a port to offer something additional to a game – especially in the case of the Wii U to Switch, where that previous console was killed off so quickly that most of these games are all quite fresh in our memories. The upcoming Toad’s Treasure Tracker will have new levels. For the kind of gameplay that a platformer offers, you do want to simply jump in and bounce around, so cutting those loading times out is actually a significant improvement to the quality of the game and what it offers.īut with other Switch ports of Wii U games, there’s been a lot more effort put in Mario Kart has all the DLC, for example. The only other “new” feature in this port worth mentioning is the loading times, which were extreme on the Wii U, and now have been cut in half, or more. On the Switch’s own screen, the game looks lovely and bright, and I think the art shrinks down better than it blows up – small details become largely inconsequential, so you can instead simply let the vibrancy wash over you. More excitingly, it’s now playable in a handheld form factor, and for someone who exclusively uses his Switch as a handheld device anyway, that’s the winning feature, much as I was more than happy to replay the original Donkey Kong Country Returns on the 3DS simply because then I could play it on the go.
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