Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze is a disaster

Let me start this off by saying that the Donkey Kong Country series is foundational to me. I grew up playing them (particularly the first one), and still make a point of listening to the music when I'm working. I'm also a pretty big platforming fan, particularly of 2D platformers. I'd been looking forward to playing Tropical Freeze for quite some time, but paying full price for this game that got extremely mixed reviews was fairly unappealing.

When I found a copy for the Switch on eBay for $30, I snapped it up immediately. "Finally," I thought, "I can give this game a shot. Worst case, I keep it around for the incredible tunes." Reader, I made a mistake

The first problem was immediately obvious: the devs fundamentally changed the game from traditional Donkey Kong Country. For instance, you ALWAYS play as Donkey (or Funky if you enable Funky Mode), with the option of adding a partner that gives you new abilities: Diddy Kong gives you a jetpack that lets you hover after jumps, Dixie gives you a helicopter ability during your jump, and Cranky gives you a bounce jump straight out of the DuckTales game. They also changed the controls so that grabbing a barrel requires a dedicated button press (where in the past you would hold the roll/run button to pick them up), and in fact have overengineered the game where you a LOT more buttons and features (hearts instead of getting one-hit, for instance) have been added to a game that never historically had them. Soon after I realized that, the game's very first level had me jump into a body of water, where I noticed that Donkey Kong now had an air meter, something that was never present in previous DKC games. Finally, I realized that you could no longer hold down the roll/run button to continually run. Instead, tapping the roll/run button has you roll, while holding it down gives you a roll-into-run that only lasts a certain amount of time. Similarly, you have to press a button to grab vines, something that previous DKCs had done almost automatically.

All of this was stuff I figured out in the very first level that immediately raised my hackles. Imagine playing a Mario game that COMPLETELY changes how Mario moves through the game from previous Mario games; essentially, imagine a Mario game where prior Mario experience is actually a hinderance rather than a help, where you have to completely retrain yourself in how a Mario game actually works and moves. Nintendo has added features and abilities to Mario before, and even made those abilities integral to the game, but they've never stripped down and rebuilt a game to this extent before.

I made it pass the first boss and got about halfway through the second stage before I hit a section that made me too frustrated to continue. This section involved riding Rambi the rhino while being chased by a collapsing tower. His base run isn't fast enough to outrun the debris falling your way, but you also can't hold down the button to continually run. The game clearly wants you to have a Celeste-like experience, where you're tapping between dash and jump to navigate the platforms, but the movement is missing Celeste's essential speed, fluidity, and responsiveness. Rambi is too damn heavy and unresponsive to make the section feel satisfying

There are certain things the game does extremely well. It uses 3D space in a unique way; I never got sick of blasting through barrels to get to a section of level that I previously only saw in the background. The game knows it's hard as hell too, so it absolutely shovels extra lives at you; by the time I quit, I still had around 40 lives. The music is as good as ever (maybe better!), the graphics are clean and capture the DKC feel well, and the feel of Donkey jumping from a standstill (without hitting run) is extremely clean. But this just isn't DKC. This is like one of those mediocre platformers from the late Genesis/early PS1 era, where they'd give you short flashes of cleverness buried under terrible gameplay.

Honestly one of the biggest disappointments of my gaming life. I had high hopes for this game, but couldn't make myself get through early stages. 4/10, Nintendo should have stepped in here.