cycycychris

User Score
9.1

Presentation - 9.0
Gameplay - 9.0
Value - 10

Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze is my first full play through of a DK game. In the past I had only played a short bit of Donkey Kong Country on the 3DS before I moved onto something else. When I got Tropical Freeze; I was hoping the newest game would help keep my attention longer than the 3DS port. I tend to loss interest in portable games faster than console games, so the original Retro game had an unfair chance. But there newest attempt at Donkey Kong Country was just brilliant.

Donkey Kong TP starts you out with the DK crew having fun in their own island when the Artic Viking creatures show up to take over the area. The story is weak, like most Nintendo platformer, which I’m fine with, since the only thing that truly matters in platformers is whether they are fun. I just kind of wish they put a bit more of a storyline since the cut scenes were all so charming and well made, it really made me wish there was more to them.

The levels are spread across 6 worlds with most containing 10 levels. There is also a secret world to unlock too. The levels vary in theme including playing through the African Sahara, Jungles, Beaches, icy levels, underwater level, and more. Most levels take advantage of the 2.5 view to create differing experience, such as all switching planes, moving to a temporary 3D view, or just cosmetic ways by creating an atmosphere through a detailed background. But overall, the cartoony style and graphic look a bit dated.  You can go from some levels being highly detail, to the next being very dull looking and a bit like it was made on the Wii then up scaled.

I must say, the level design is excellent.  The whole game is design around creating hard, but fair levels, which I think they perfectly pulled off. DK mostly pulls out the normal tricks from the other platformer such as jumping between bottomless pits, having to swing on vines, hanging from the roof, jumping between platforms and so on. But it puts its own style to it with your assist characters and the added challenge.

As mentioned before, DK TP features 3 assist characters Dixie, Cranky, and Diddy Kong. They all feature their own abilities, such a cranky uses his cane to jump on spikes or uses it to have a higher jump. Dixies uses her hair to have a higher and further jumping distance. And finally Diddy has his Jetpack to extend his jumps. A lot of the levels are designed with each of these characters abilities in mind, since they are quite a few levels that have lengthy spikey parts and some that test your distance jump skills a bit more than others. So, it’s clear they had a character in mind for each level, but if you’re playing multiplayer and enter with another character you’ll be fine, all levels can be easily completed without bringing the ideal side kick.

The assist characters also added another layer to the game. And that’s when multiplayer came into play, you can play DK with either one or 2 players. The 2nd player will get to play as the support character (Dixie, Cranky, Diddy). They can either play on their own or attach to you as you go through a level. In single player the support character will be connect to you the whole time unless they die, then you will need to find a barrel to revive them.

 I played the whole game in multiplayer and only played one single level in single player, so my review is mostly based on playing with a friend. Multiplayer in my opinion added a lot more to this game since it was fun to see your friend fail at a jump or have one of you experiment with an idea. This was something I found missing from playing the 3DS game, it was missing social interaction and DK TP found that balance brilliantly. If you have a friend to play with, I would highly suggest playing together.

There one last unique thing DK adds from other games, which is its mine kart or a rocket based levels. These levels are very fast moving and many of them require quick reactions and a lot of memorizing where to go, especially if you want to get the collectable. I personally enjoyed the mine kart levels, due to the challenge and verity they offered. But I was never a fan of the rocket levels; I found the controls to have a rather large learning curve that was really off putting. A lot of the time I didn’t exactly feel I always had control of the rocket. But my friend was decent at these levels and thought they were ok, so we ended up evening it out. I did the mine karts and he did the rockets.

The greatest achievement for DK is that I never found the levels to be stale once I finished them, which was good since every level featured 8 puzzle piece and the 4 letters ‘KONG’ to find. So it created a great scavenger hunt game that made you take your time through a level and to look closely at every spot. I only finished probably 10% of the levels with every puzzle piece on our first try, so I had to do another go through of almost all the levels to complete them and neither me nor my roommate really minded. It added great replay ability.

But that did create a small issue; the placement of the puzzle pieces weren’t always that great. I found that several of these only were trigged to appear once your past over a certain point, but that created an issue with these locations not always being a point where they bring you to a stop to see that a puzzle piece just spawned behind you, so it created bad situations where you would be dumbfounded at where they might be. A long with a few being unreachable with only DK, which created a bad situation for the multiplayer aspect of the game. It’s a bit lame to get to a point and say to your friend that he needs to get up here to get it.

One thing I always found a bit disappointing throughout the levels was how generic all the enemies designs were. None were really that creative and felt like something we’ve seen before. You ran into a generic looking penguin, walrus, bird and so on. It really didn’t feel like the usual detailed design that has gone into the many enemies throughout Nintendo series of games.

But I wouldn’t call the bosses generic like most of the enemies, I wouldn’t say any of them are exactly memorable either. But they were excellently crafted battles that make you learn what the boss patterns and use that to exploit them. And I thank Retro for going against the Nintendo norm and deciding to not make the bosses 3 hits and done. It gave them much more freedom when designing the battles and created an overall more enjoyable experience. But I would have to complain that some of the bosses really badly needed checkpoints. This created a bit of frustration to be fighting a boss for 7 minutes only to fail and have to do the whole thing over again. But at the end of the day, I enjoyed the bosses more than I typically do with other Nintendo games.

The live system in DK could also make bosses a bit annoying since you got them all figured out and you run out lives, then you must go through a lot of load screens to get back to map to go buy more lives. This whole lives idea kind of feels a bit dated, but I can respect it in this game since it reinforces the idea to be strategic on your movements and progression. And it does a good job at making you collect all the bananas and coins in each level. Without the live system, there would be no need for bananas and coins, which would have left a lot of the levels very bare and less enjoyable

And finally, the sound track is amazing; David Wise was a genius once again. He brought back some of the iconic DK songs along with a whole new selection on songs. My friend and I intentionally played a few levels several times just to give certain songs a second listen; I must give Mr. Wise a standing ovation for his work on this game.