Donkey Kong Bananza isn't exactly what you'd expect in the launch window of Nintendo's newest console. You'd probably, understandably, anticipate a new 3D Super Mario title. After all, Super Mario Odyssey made an enormous splash in 2017 on Switch, both critically and commercially. Meanwhile, the Donkey Kong franchise hadn't seen an original game since 2014's under-performing Tropical Freeze, and hadn't seen a 3D installment since the previous century. But with a fresh audience eager for games and open to new experiences, perhaps this is the perfect time for "the leader of the bunch" to reintroduce himself.

Bananza starts off on Ingot Isle, where monkey prospectors have discovered something monumental: golden bananas. This is fortunate for the local economy, but also good news for Donkey Kong, who recently travelled to the island in search of fortune. Before the legendary ape can enjoy the gilded treasure, however, a strange earthen sphere appears in the sky. Occupied by several peculiar primates, the sphere crashes into the refinery and takes everything with it — bananas included — down, down into the depths of the planet. It's there that DK meets Odd Rock, who turns out to be the singing prodigy Pauline. Together, they delve deeper into the Underground World, collecting golden bananas, meeting strange inhabitants, and tracking down the villains responsible for the calamity above.

The premise in this latest Donkey Kong game is quite good. Instead of embracing the flow of a typical mascot action game, in which the hero travels to different lands or, in the case of games like Super Mario Galaxy and Astro Bot, different planets, Bananza sets its protagonist on a single journey downward, from planet crust to planet core. There's a compelling, realistic feeling that you're diving deeper and deeper, into stranger and more alien realms. It's exciting, mysterious, and even a little dangerous.

As for the storyline, it's completely fine, in that typical Nintendo "here's the gameplay loop, now let's layer a narrative over it" way. You have a charismatic hero, a dastardly villain, a MacGuffin, and clear stakes. And, really, that's all you need. The problem is that the scribes at Nintendo EPD dared to introduce some interesting thematic elements, but didn't fully explore them. These focus around Pauline, who is, regrettably, underused. Pauline is a gifted singer but suffers from debilitating stage fright. She's also lost and alone, and looks to DK as a protector — a sort of father figure. But EPD doesn't really unpack these ideas during the adventure. Now, I'm not saying I want Nintendo to make one of those "sad dad" simulators that peaked during the seventh generation, but I do believe Bananza could have benefited from a little more pathos. 

Narrative is a secondary or even tertiary concern in these kinds of games, however. The main focus is a reliable, rewarding gameplay loop. Judged on that metric, Bananza is one of the best titles of the last five years.

Don't mistake it for a spiritual successor to, or even in the same genre as, Super Mario Odyssey, though. Yes, Bananza shares some similarities to the legendary 2017 game — the controls are impossibly precise, the levels are open-ended and full of secrets, and the art direction is bursting with creative energy — but I would be reluctant to call it a 3D platformer, or even a true action-adventure game. It's really more of a straight action game, with the collectathon energy of games like Super Mario 64 and Donkey Kong 64, the power fantasy of The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, and a small dose of the "I did it my way" gameplay from the recent Zelda duology. Ultimately, it feels like the sort of experimental, ambitious adventure Rare would produce in the mid-to-late 90s — which is just about the highest praise a game can get.

Bananza, then, is a 3D action game that emphasizes open-world exploration and destructibility. As Donkey Kong, you'll search each domain in the Underground World for golden bananas, or, in the parlance of the game, Banandium Gems. To obtain them, you must chat with friendly NPCs, investigate off the beaten path, clobber enemies, and, in many cases, obliterate everything around you. It's at this intersection of the collectible and the destructible that Bananza truly shines, and unlocks all that pleasure-giving dopamine. The game will give you shiny glimpses of bananas, then task you with climbing tall peaks or crashing downward through earth and stone to collect them. With hundreds of gems to collect, and thousands of cubic meters of dirt, rock, sand, iron, lava, ice, and crystal to destroy, there is no shortage of things to uncover.

It's hard to overestimate how liberating and gleeful the destruction is in Bananza. You can burrow and punch through almost anything; you can worm your way through entire levels with enough patience and perseverance. And the process is enhanced with a stellar control setup. As befitting a game engineered by the geniuses who brought us Super Mario Odyssey, this Donkey Kong adventure has perfect controls. Everything is tight, tactile, and breathlessly responsive. You can punch forward, upward, and downward with ease, and rip chunks of material from the ground with abandon. Donkey Kong is a bruising, muscle-bound primate, but he's also incredibly graceful in motion. Consequently, moving around the Underground World is an absolute joy.

If there's a flaw to this cycle of destruction and discovery, it's this: Donkey Kong Bananza, despite its many wonders, its pristine moment-to-moment action, and its dizzying sense of freedom, slides into repetition fairly early. While each underground layer is unique visually, and comes with specific NPCs and materials, it unfolds in pretty much the same way. Bananas are hidden in the same types of places, the missions are copy-paste affairs, and the instructions from the elders, who occupy the larger, more complex layers, are more or less identical. In this way, the game is unlike recent 3D Super Mario offerings, which introduce and discard ideas with an almost reckless enthusiasm. By comparison, Bananza is more conservative, content to repurpose its core loop in different locales. It will take you 20-30 hours to beat the game, but you'll have mastered it far before then.

To be fair, the game does introduce some wrinkles, especially toward the end game. One layer is dedicated solely to a racetrack, operated by Donkey Kong's BFFs (banana-finding friends), while another is focused on assembling a 200-meter high hamburger. Other layers experiment with anti-gravity mechanics, enemies that are made inert by sunlight, and switches that swap repelling rubber with destructible gold. There are also plenty of boss battles to keep you on your toes. These are creative and dynamic affairs, and make good use of physical space and DK's move set. However, apart from the final few, they're on the easy side.

Then there are the Bananza transformations, which grant DK the powers of certain animal friends. The Kong Bananza, for example, makes him super strong, able to destroy more resilient materials. The Zebra Bananza allows him to dash over fragile surfaces, including water. And the Ostrich Bananza grants him the ability to flutter and glide across hazardous areas. These and other transformations are useful in problem-solving situations, and they help spice up the action considerably.

They also arrive with their own rousing theme songs, sung by Pauline herself. The Zebra Bananza, with its trumpets and castanets, has a driving Latin-inspired beat which is thoroughly addictive; it's simply the best. The music in general is excellent in Bananza. Not only are there new, exciting orchestrations from Naoto Kubo, the lead composer from Odyssey, but also rearrangements based on the legendary work of David Wise and Grant Kirkhope.

The graphical landscape of the game is equally impressive. Each layer in the underworld has its own visual identity, with dozens of little details and quirks. In the resort layer, for instance, the sandy, bleached beaches are covered with giant fruits. If you look up, you'll even see a sun in the shape of a banana slice. And every terrain type in every layer has a realistic look, texture, and behavior, whether it's glossy iron, transparent crystal, crumbling dirt, or even gooey cheese (yes, really). Bananza is a treat for the eyes.

It's also a treat technically. The voxel technology that underpins all of the game's terrain is deployed to great effect, providing players with both an invigorating level of freedom to solve problems in creative ways and a fulfilling sense of forward momentum. There's a beautiful feedback loop in Bananza, whereby player actions trigger environmental reactions, which open up new opportunities for player action. It's hard to stop once you get going.

If there's one technical flaw, it's that the normally steady 60 fps rate can drop to 30 fps during hectic, visual effect-heavy boss fights.

That's a flaw that's easy to overlook, however, especially when almost everything else in the game is exemplary. Nintendo took a bit of a risk with Bananza — opting for DK over Mario in the launch window and focusing on hard-hitting action over light-footed platforming — but it has paid off. This is the killer app on Switch 2, thanks to snappy controls, imaginative art direction, a mysterious "journey to the center of the earth" premise, rousing music, rewarding exploration, and the intelligent, thoughtful deployment of voxel technology, which provides players exhilarating navigational and problem-solving freedom. DK fans, rejoice: he's finally back to kick some tail.