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Not so much the basic platforming, but the need to fall off every cliff along the way in the hope of finding a barrel or similar that would inch you closer to that 100 per cent completion. Anyone who remembers playing those old Donkey Kong Country SNES titles will remember all-too-well just how horrible the level design was. There is one new feature that is exclusive to the Switch – and I’ll get to them later on in the review, but it doesn’t add anything to the game for existing fans of Donkey Kong titles.īut putting all of that aside, the game itself is a rather lovely platformer that straddles the line between staying true to the original titles, and adding enough modern stuff to get rid of the irritations. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask a port to offer something additional to a game – especially in the case of the Wii U to Switch, where that previous console was killed off so quickly that most of these games are all quite fresh in our memories. The upcoming Toad’s Treasure Tracker will have new levels.
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For the kind of gameplay that a platformer offers, you do want to simply jump in and bounce around, so cutting those loading times out is actually a significant improvement to the quality of the game and what it offers.īut with other Switch ports of Wii U games, there’s been a lot more effort put in Mario Kart has all the DLC, for example. The only other “new” feature in this port worth mentioning is the loading times, which were extreme on the Wii U, and now have been cut in half, or more. On the Switch’s own screen, the game looks lovely and bright, and I think the art shrinks down better than it blows up – small details become largely inconsequential, so you can instead simply let the vibrancy wash over you. More excitingly, it’s now playable in a handheld form factor, and for someone who exclusively uses his Switch as a handheld device anyway, that’s the winning feature, much as I was more than happy to replay the original Donkey Kong Country Returns on the 3DS simply because then I could play it on the go.
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