Donkey Kong Bananza | Review

September 4 This review was updated to meet the new review guidelines of Source Gaming.
Thanks to PhantomZ2 for edits and NantenJex for suggestions.

In 2025, it is not so surprising to see Donkey Kong smash his way through the dirt. The year has already seen several notable digging games; one of its breakout indies is the incredibly self-descriptive A Game About Digging a Hole. Minecraft, whose players spend hours breaking down ore by hand, is perhaps the world’s most popular game. Action titles about large scale destruction have always had a place in this industry, from Red Faction to Worms to Control. Sony’s would-be mascot platformer Knack, like Donkey Kong’s latest adventure, used hyper-specific destruction almost as a tech demo. This is part of the appeal of voxels, microscopic 3D object pieces which allow a granularity for both the developer making a world and the player destroying it. It makes sense, this interest. The ability to rip apart the geometry of the world may be the purest example of player empowerment.

Granted, the superlative Donkey Kong Bananza is a bit different from those examples, starting by the fact that it’s a 3D platformer. Made by Nintendo EPD 8, the team behind Super Mario’s 3D games, it’s their first fully new title since the superlative Super Mario Odyssey. Unlike Minecraft or Control, it’s all about movement; destruction just happens to be the main form of movement. After all, three of the four face buttons are dedicated to punching, just whether you want to hit straight, down, or up. It’s a perfect setup for a game set in huge sandbox levels made of destructible voxel surfaces, all dirt and stone and so much else all waiting to be bashed.

Image: Source Gaming. A game so based around destruction that you can shatter the NPCs. They grow back.

The plot puts this into context: each bespoke Layer adjoins not geographically but vertically, and the prospecting Donkey Kong is digging from one to the next until he hits the fabled Planet Core. He’s in a race with VoidCo, a company of dastardly Kongs whose trip is messing up this Underground World. Within each Layer, you roll around, rip terra firma up, bust their latest scheme, then go down to the next floor. But this isn’t a solo journey. Much like in Mario’s adventures, Donkey Kong has a sidekick, the precocious teen singer Pauline. In grand Nintendo fashion, she’s as much a game mechanic as a character; her music opens locks, provides directions, and unlocks powerful transformations. What distinguishes her from Mario’s sidekicks is character development. Pauline is a proper deuteragonist, with a personality, neuroses, and full, expressive voice acting (the latter rare for Nintendo) that contrast greatly with our hero’s cartoony expressions and crazed antics.

I don’t want to overstate the story’s weight; EPD has not made a prestige narrative. But this double act is about as close as the studio and its publisher have ever come to the aesthetics of the “sad dad game” design sensibility of modern blockbusters, putting the ape in the role of the only barely aggrieved parent. It also marries the gameplay during a very Nintendo-y sequence when the two are separated and DK has to go on without her powers. The two are a great pair.

Image: Source Gaming. Our two leads. You get costumes like Pauline’s miner clothes, DK’s trans rights fur, and his Donkey Kong pants by trading in Fossils to specific traders.

Bananza’s other virtues are so many that it’s hard to give them all proper attention. The soundtrack is filled with bangers. The pacing is relatively free of gates and guardrails. The boss fights are wonderfully imaginative. The graphics are incredible, with tremendous particle effects and an art direction that keeps finding new ideas. This is a stellar killer app for Nintendo Switch 2, and any owner of the new console would do well to play it. But its greatest virtue—and what I find most revealing—is how almost every other revolves around its central game mechanic. As Donkey Kong destroys each subterranean level with largely uninterrupted impunity, he’s also digging up mechanics, dangers, and his own legacy. He is, like the game, and like the player, an archaeologist. In grand Nintendo fashion, even when the goal is to break, everything builds outwards from the core.

Structurally, the game shelves the “collect-a-thon” conventions of the genre. There are nearly eight hundred Banandium Gems for DK to nosh on, but they don’t connect to plot progression like the trinkets of most 3D platformers; they’re just points for a skill tree. Instead, the critical path through each Layer entails overcoming several platforming and combat challenges, and Bananza is excited to see how you choose to reach them. Maybe you scope out a far-off hole at the bottom of some mountain, jump towards it for fun, only to find you’ve bypassed an entire section and skipped straight to the boss. Maybe you bust open a cap and cause a plot-relevant flood before you’re told to do that. Every object in or under these lands—Gems, chips, nuggets, fossils, vinyls, maps, chests—exist almost as signposts that all read “smash.” A game about going after objects incentivizes exploration. This incentivizes cutting a swath.

Image: Source Gaming. The Elephant Bananza form is perhaps the most powerful, as it can slurp up the entire level within seconds—including, potentially, what’s beneath your feet.

To aid in this structure (and to differentiate him from Mario even further), Donkey Kong steadily unlocks five “Bananza” transformations. Doled out across the adventure, these temporarily give him a hypnotically horrible animal form, like a zebra or ostrich. Each comes with additive boosts, like super speed or flight, that build upon DK’s robust suite of moves. However, they can at times feel more like Metroid-esque power-ups, or solutions whose puzzles were made retroactively. This comes from the actual puzzles that need them, as well as how they build on an already wildly permissive game. You can bust your way through almost any surface, find alternate routes, and, if you’ve got the time, make ridiculous pathways over gaps. Going Bananza can take that so much further, but it’s easy to treat them as one-off power-ups. A preview of the game showed DK jumping between two forms to get to a floating platform. When I got there, I instead spent a half hour building a bridge of thrown sand chunks. When you can already punch an entire continent into nonexistence, these powers can seem less memorable.

That destruction is second to none, it must be said. DK punches enemies offscreen and busts walls open like a wrecking ball. He can rip off a chunk of stone, swing it to do far more damage, aim and toss it, or ride it like a top over acid. He can climb most surfaces, and even slippery walls can be overcome through clever tricks. Threats like enemies, damaging surfaces, and harsh blockades are fairly easy to fell. At times, especially early on, it’s comically easy due to the sheer amount of power you’re given—to say nothing of the wonderfully broken co-op mode. Early on, you’re liable to find most of the difficulty in the curated, one-off Challenge rooms. However, the challenge does ramp up over time until reaching the absolutely bonkers end game, thanks not just to more dangerous enemies, but to the land itself.

Image: Source Gaming. One spectacular boss can change the terrain at will, leaning to a fight where you’re juggling your knowledge of different materials.

Part of this is simple: as you slam through increasingly deep strata, you’ll steadily find sediment and enemies slightly harder than the last. It takes more time punching the earth out, pulling it up, and smacking it against enemies who incorporate sturdier terrain into their armor. But this also goes hand in hand with materials that aren’t just stone. Layer 2 might add a mud that slows you down and is too slick to climb, and later on you’ll find a thorny metal that shrugs off most hits or an enemy rocking a carapace of lava. Those Bananza powers become increasingly vital to getting around, as are offerings from the skill tree. Eventually, the simplicity of the opening acts feels like a feint, especially once you get down a few floors, look at the land, and realize that this is a surprisingly brainy game.

It only takes a few early Layers of mostly stone and dirt before Banaza starts trading in stranger surfaces, and afterwards it doesn’t stop. All have distinct properties for whether you’re walking, climbing, throwing, or being hit by it. There’s a rubber that repels you, seeds you throw at wood to sprout homing vines, Bomb Rocks that leave craters in walls, antigravity glue brought down if you toss a chunk on it. Perhaps craziest is the Switcheroo Goo, a gelatin you can punch from a pink container to a blue one for spatial reasoning conundrums. By the time you get to the rocket stone, or a boss whose mode of attack involves changing the ground itself, the trick is revealed. The land DK is on is as important as DK himself, which means the environment is a puzzle married to platforming and difficulty. In Freezer Layer’s three floors, you go from rough snow and slippery ice to a spongy lava that seeps into gaps. Pretty much every enemy and boss gets reused, but as every reuse involves some kind of new sediment, it feels less gratuitous.

Image: Source Gaming. One particularly wild puzzle. A lot of the more gimmicky materials can be avoid with good platforming, but Challenges like this put them front and center.

That is true of the non-smashing mechanics. In a race against Diddy and Dixie Kong, or while exploring a Layer that revolves around light, what you’re walking on always matters. The near-religious obsession with the land and how you break it means the game can conjure up and combine new mechanics again and again. Which is good, because Donkey Kong Bananza is BIG. Excluding the tutorial, there are sixteen Layers. Almost all of them have multiple sub-Layers, and almost all of those eclipse even the biggest Kingdoms of Super Mario Odyssey. It’s a lot, and it may stretch your enthusiasm, even if almost all of it is entirely optional (the Bananas you get for beating bosses don’t actually have to be collected). The density and scope is unbelievable and a surprising match for Mario Kart World, its fellow Switch 2 show pony.

Technologically, the game is even better in that role. All seventeen worlds are sumptuously rendered, all full of color and destructible objects (this is also true of the sub-Layers, as they can wildly change within the same level). The voxel terrain feels like it should, too; you can feel the differences in each surface and each hit as you destroy it piece by piece. Bananza also takes great pleasure in peppering purely decorative terrain on top, like matted, fur-like grass or piles of giant nails, just so you can enjoy an endless shower of particle effects. And if you pull up the 3D map of your area, you’ll see all the damage you’ve done to your current level in loving detail. It’s yet more encouragement to run wild; you can get around many challenges with clever platforming, but everything pushes you to destroy. Even the load times blitz right by. From a purely sensory perspective, this may well end up this year’s most purely fun release.

Image: Source Gaming. Everything in Bananza, every graphic and sound effect and rumble, is tuned to the punching. You’ll be throwing thousands and thousands of hits, and it feels great every time.

Alongside fossils to trade for clothes or gold for more of those visual effects, Donkey Kong is also digging up parts of Nintendo history. It’s here where Bananza gets stranger. In theory, it’s acting as a Mario Odyssey successor. There are the staggeringly high number of collectibles, the puzzle bosses, the basics of the critical path, and the many repeated UI tropes. Most overt is Pauline herself, who’s more well known as the grown-up mayor and singer of Odyssey’s New Donk City. It’s a far different experience, though; if Mario Odyssey was jazz, a dance from one collectible to the next that followed your whims, this is a drum solo. Bananza falls more naturally in with the crop of new, Switch-era Nintendo games, like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Echoes of Wisdom, the Super Mario Maker duology, and Pikmin 4. These are sequels whose wild ideas threatened to break the format, but instead of corralling them, Nintendo built challenges around them but otherwise ceded control to players. The almost Wario-like destruction is this, an opportunity to break the game world but always with pitfalls. Literal ones in this case.

Pauline isn’t just a Mario character, of course, but a Donkey Kong one as well; her adult self was the damsel in the original Donkey Kong from 1981. The girders and music of that game litter this one like bones. Tunes from Rare Ltd’s Donkey Kong Country are there, too, with Cranky Kong and DKC-inspired bonus levels along for the ride. An eleventh hour twist brings back a fan favorite with so much pomp and circumstance that they gleefully hijack the rest of the story. Plus, the focus on punching is a different sort of callback—to EPD8’s first game, the GameCube cult platformer Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. Bananza is trying to respect all eras of Donkey Kong (except for Retro Studios stellar 2010s games, which are almost entirely sidelined), but it doesn’t feel like a grand culmination. The game is simply too radical. Rather, the feeling is one of excavation, of Donkey Kong digging deeper and deeper to find the core of his identity. That core, according to Bananza, is strength. It suggests that every minecart ride and chucked barrel and bop of a Kremling was always an expression of power. That what unites DK’s foes, whether his old rivals Mario and King K. Rool or VoidCo now, is a cleverness he has to overcome. It’s also part of his relationship with Pauline, as they’re both trying to protect each other.

Image: Source Gaming. One of the Donkey Kong Country “Nostalgia” levels imagines a world where those classic games had this kind of crazed action.

His power is tantalizing and at times overwhelming. You really can do so much at any point. No matter where you are, there’s always rock to tear off, a vein of gold to fill your Bananza meter, a purchasable Getaway in which to sleep and access your fun outfits. You can even grab rocks off the Fractones, NPCs whose stony bodies instantly regenerate. What keeps it all focused are three things: that incredibly strong baseline, the willingness to experiment, and DK himself, who is at about his most fun and crazed. His facial animations are stunning.

It is not a perfect game. There are a couple times where Bananza contracts, like a late game section that forces you to pony up a ton of gold after a game’s worth of it being both optional and almost entirely valueless. The frame rate can occasionally dip, though I only noticed it in one of the final, very disruptive boss fights. The skill tree often pings between being delightfully additive, totally superfluous, and borderline required. And the size can be draining if you want to 100%-ing the game. Pretty much all of these are, to some extent, consequences of this power and destruction. They’re also issues I’m not sure we’ll ever see addressed in a future game, as this is almost too singular and dense of a work for a sequel to feel needed. Outside of hoping for a bit more postgame content, there was never a point where I felt a dearth of content.

Image: Source Gaming. Digging a hole to solve a puzzle. While all the levels have an indestructible bottom floor, there’s so much for you to hit before you can reach it. Even this one doesn’t come close.

But whether we get one, what an accomplishment. Donkey Kong Bananza is an absolutely stellar entrant in the canon of environmental destruction, and easily one of Nintendo’s best releases in the 2020s. It combines immediate empowerment, a massive possibility space, and a high skill ceiling that allows for tricks, self-direction, and implausible sequence breaking (my colleague, Phantom, beat the game without one of the “required” transformations; check out his video review here). It also feels true to Donkey Kong and his complicated history. Whether it’s a fully new direction for the big ape or just one part of a conspicuous Donkey Kong resurgence—remastered games, dedicated plans for more 2D and 3D sequels, a theme park, an apparent movie spinoff—it is a fantastic game for Switch 2’s second month and an instant standout for 2025.