In typical Nintendo style this is gaming at its most irreverent and, most importantly, fun. It's not the Citizen Kane of gaming, a title Retro Studios was awarded by some for Metroid Prime, but it's humorous and full of quirky character. There are eight initial areas/worlds, with between 6-8 levels and a boss encounter, with each progressive area moving around and up DK's island as he battles masked Tikis to retrieve his banana stash. Like almost any platformer with a Nintendo brand, your adventure starts off in the hero's home territory, gently introducing you to the mechanics before ramping up the difficulty.

This is running and jumping like the old days, but DK has a real sense of weight - appropriate for a large tie-wearing ape - and adjusting to that feel is one of the first challenges and delights that you'll face. While there are enough throwbacks to entertain fans of Rare's Super NES trilogy of titles, Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D nevertheless stamps its own identity on the franchise, with a cartoonish visual style, exceptional performance and weighty physics. If you missed out on the Wii version, you arguably passed on the finest 2D platformer on the system, though it certainly has a lot of competition. The exceptional level design in Donkey Kong Country Returns on Wii featured dynamic shifts in perspective and depth, so this 3DS port makes a lot of sense, in that respect, and we'll ease any lingering nerves right off the bat - Monster Games has done a terrific job with Retro Games' masterpiece.Īnd it is a masterpiece. It's tempting to be blase about it, but it's still the only mainstream piece of hardware - certainly in gaming terms - that uses it so effectively. It's easy to forget, as Nintendo has seemingly decided that it's no longer a definitive unique selling point, but the 3DS has a fantastic stereoscopic 3D screen.

Donkey kong country returns 3d review