Hasta La Gadget!

Fifteen years ago, Nintendo blew our minds with the Donkey Kong
Country series. Prerendered graphics brought out some of the best-looking games
on the Super Nintendo, and incredibly clever level design offered some of the
best gameplay this side of anything with “Mario” in the title.

The last Donkey Kong Country game came out in 1999, and
since then gaming’s most famous ape has been restricted to playing drums, kart
racing, rhythmic vine-climbing, and brawling. Now, in 2010, Donkey Kong Country
is back with Donkey Kong Country Returns on the Nintendo Wii.

The game looks and plays just like the Donkey Kong Country
games of yore. You play Donkey Kong and his buddy Diddy, jumping, rolling, and
throwing barrels across a tropical island in a quest to recover your precious
stash of bananas. Of course, that’s not all you do. You fight various bosses,
solve puzzles, collect banana coins, jigsaw puzzles, and the letters K, O, N,
and G to unlock different things in the game, and generally find many, many
excuses to play through the game’s several dozen states several times over.

Donkey Kong Country Returns is fun. It’s also hard.
Painfully, frustratingly, controller-throwingly hard. It’s safe to say you’re
going to die many times in this game. It doesn’t ever feel unfair, though; just
very, very challenging. Every time you fall in a pit, or onto some spikes, or
into an enemy’s path, you can be certain it was a matter of your own timing and
controls, and not the game’s glitches. That won’t soften the frustration when
you die for the 20^th time trying to get that elusive jigsaw puzzle
piece, though.

You might occasionally waggle and shake the Wiimote to
perform certain moves, but otherwise Donkey Kong Country Returns feels just
like the old Donkey Kong Country games, and that’s a very good thing. It’s
deceptively simple, remarkably challenging, and incredibly polished, and a
worthy purchase for any fan of old-school side-scrolling Nintendo action.