Donkey Kong Bananza Isn’t Your Dad’s Donkey Kong – and that’s great
One of the pure joy moments of the Direct was seeing Donkey Kong smash out of the rocks in the opening beats of the Donkey Kong Bananza trailer and witnessing a wonderful new Donkey Kong. No, it’s not the Donkey Kong we’ve all known for the last twenty or thirty years—it’s time. Rareware’s Donkey Kong has served us well, but along with the design change, we’ve also got a new DK game that feels like something entirely fresh.
We’ve had 3D Donkey Kong games before—we all clamour for Donkey Kong 64 to come to Nintendo Switch Onlineevery week—but that kind of game just wouldn’t work today. And after playing twenty or so minutes of Bananza, I’m feeling confident about where DK is headed.
The demo begins just like in the trailer, with DK busting out of his mine. This mine is populated with other monkeys digging up gold and giant ornate bananas, which DK then eats. These giant bananas, when collected, present just like the “You got a Star!” banners in Super Mario Odyssey, complete with a funny little phrase under the banana’s name. The mine itself is fairly linear, serving as the game’s introduction area, but as you’ll soon learn in Bananza, you can pretty much smash DK through anything. The walls, the floor, the roof—he adapts easily to climbing as well, and you can just Hulk-smash through the lot of it. Inside, you’ll find a bunch of collectibles as well—so we’re not all the way removed from Donkey Kong 64.
Donkey Kong here doesn’t move like the slow plodding ape we’re used to, he picks up speed like Mario and is super fun to control as you put him wherever you need something smashed. It’s not all smashing, there’s platforming, puzzles and even ripping blocks apart and chucking at enemies – wait, that does sound still like smashing.
The game itself looks amazing, from the wonderfully furry Donkey Kong to the environments, which feel like a mix of Super Mario Odyssey and Astro Bot. The one world we got to play in after the mine was massive—the in-game map felt more like a chunk of the Breath of the Wild map than a world from Odyssey. There’s that game again. Nintendo hasn’t said who’s making this one, but it would be very surprising if it wasn’t the Odyssey team—it has their fingerprints all over it.
The Switch 2 clearly was helping this game look its best as well, when DK goes full berserk and is just ripping up the furniture the system holds up strongly as there’s some great terrain deformation here. The animation not just on Donkey Kong but all the characters in the game as well is fantastic, he’s really coming to life.
Really keen to play more of Bananza, and luckily we won’t have to wait too long with the game out on July 17th, 2025.
Vooks travelled to New York as a guest of Nintendo Australia.
