Donkey Kong Bananza (Nintendo Switch 2 Review)

Donkey Kong Bananza
Platform: Nintendo Switch 2
Released July 17, 2025
Directed by Wataru Tanaka and Kazuya Takahashi
Developed by Nintendo
$69.99 (normally $79.99) chopped down a mountain with the edge of my hand in the making of this review.

THIS IS NOT A SPOILER-FREE REVIEW!
I’m awarding Bananza a YES! verdict.
That’s because there’s far more good than bad in this game.
But I also HATED the last third of Bananza, and I explain why.
And there will be spoilers!

The above screenshot was a really bad sign of how things would end for Donkey Kong Bananza. In one of the worst boss designs I can remember, you have to manually travel between several past worlds just to smack main baddie “Void Kong” a few times in each world. And when I say “manually” I mean you have to chase Void Kong, smacking him and then chase him more because he runs away and his primary attack is to put crap between you and him. After you chase him and smack him enough times, a cut scene happens and he warps to a prior stage. You then have to go to the warp gong, hit it, then go to the next level the Void Kong is in. Repeat doing this until it tells you that you don’t have to anymore.

It’s a complete slog and a bore that grinds the game to a screeching halt. You have to chase him through the Junction Layer (“Layers” are levels), then chase him through the Hilltop Layer, then chase him through the Lagoon Layer, and then BACK to the Junction Layer. It’s not fun AT ALL. It’s not exciting AT ALL. It’s not satisfying to make progress AT ALL. I don’t remember a single boss fight that was transformed into unbearable busywork quite like this. It’s such an overindulgent idea that it should have been rejected out of hand when it was pitched. Yet, here it is, in the final game. Up to this point, I was head over heels for Donkey Kong Bananza. It’s the sequel to Super Mario Odyssey I’ve been waiting almost eight years for, and that’s not hyperbole. The game did recover after this sequence, but it would eventually crater for good, a solid five or so hours before the actual ending.

Mario Odyssey leapfrogged the first WarioWare to become my all-time favorite video game. Okay, the fact that Odyssey and WarioWare are my two favorite games probably speaks volumes about my attention span but I don’t care. I couldn’t put Odyssey down and, as long as it didn’t involve a jump rope, I never got bored with it. I even beat it a second time last year. I found every Moon, in every stage, and all the post game stuff, TWICE. I would have totally bought Odyssey DLC if it had been offered. I was good to go for weeks or even months after I finished it, both times. And there are no words to describe how overjoyed I was that Bananza’s hunt for bananas and fossils is exactly like the moons and purple coins in Odyssey. Like, 90% like it. The fossils are based around the Terraria-like digging, but the SEARCH for them is identical. It’s a direct Super Mario Odyssey sequel in everything but the name. EVEN WITH THE NEW GAMEPLAY MECHANICS, it’s Super Mario Odyssey 2, or like amazing DLC for Odyssey that grants you a new character in Donkey Kong. The logic of the level design is the same. The amount of moons/bananas is basically the same, and the variety of ways to find them has a very similar vibe. Some are just laying around, others are bought, and some you have to go hell and back to get. Again, it’s a direct sequel with a new character. Period.

And I was in love. This felt like it justified my Switch 2 purchase by itself. No joke. I got so much value out of Bananza that I have to give it a YES! because the amount of quality gaming hours I experienced far exceeded the bad parts. And that’s why I was so frustrated by the last few levels of Bananza. The last “real” level that’s Odyssey-like is basically broken, and after that, the game just f*cking refuses to end. The fun is barely visible in the rear view mirror by that point. The last couple levels, especially, are boring settings and broken mechanics.The difficulty spikes dramatically while also slowing down because the game leans extra-heavily into knocking you off the stage. When that happens it takes away a balloon (balloons are so common that you dig them up even after you reach the max 99, which is crap) and returns you to the start of the sequence you were on. It’s a very slow mechanic because you have to fall all the way to the bottom of whatever pit you’re on, so it’s like if you were playing Castlevania and the legendary knock-back of that game took five to ten seconds to recover and start moving again. Maybe even longer.

I’m fine with the recovery time punishment when it’s my fault. If I’m walking around, trashing a level and I screw up and fall off the side of a wall or tunnel through a mountain into oblivion, fine. A long recovery time is a good incentive to not do that again. But I object to the enemy design deliberately going for the knock-back, because now you’re in the action part of the game and not the exploration part. Okay, it’s technically accurate that allowing an enemy to hit me is also my fault, but apples and oranges, because having such a long recovery time in the thick of battle is boring. It’s like the development team forgot that we’re playing video games specifically to not be bored, but the game’s sudden obsession over the final four levels with going for the over-the-ledge knockouts is beyond the pale. And suddenly all the mechanical foibles I had been overlooking for a couple weeks weren’t nothingburgers anymore.

As much as I enjoyed DKB, it was never a perfect game. It has one of the worst cameras Nintendo has done since the GameCube era, back when 3D games were brand new and game makers were still figuring that stuff out. I assume it’s based on the “almost every solid surface can be destroyed” element. The camera is NOT suitable for it, as it’s often hard to find a good angle to do what you want to do. But then there’s other janky things. Many of the power-ups have multiple actions mapped to a single button. Tap the button to do one thing, hold it for the other, and it’s badly programmed, as regardless of what you INTEND to do, tap or hold, the game will do the opposite. It never gets better, either, and so even against the final-final-final-final-final boss (yes, all those finals make sense), I would need multiple attempts to perform the action I intended to do because the game doesn’t (can’t?) wait to see if I was holding or tapping the button. Which seems like it defeats the point of making it like that to begin with.

Whether you’re powered-up or not, the act of aiming a pile of terrain you’re holding, which pulls the game into a third-person view with a crosshair, fails constantly. Sometimes it will just plain not work the first attempt, or second, or third. Maybe it’ll throw the piece away, which means you have to scoop-up more. Since you probably NEED this mechanic to work when you’re trying to use it, especially if it’s during combat, it’s a pretty damning thing to happen as often as it does. The animal power-ups fail just as often. The elephant has two powers, the first of which is the ability to vacuum up the terrain. It’s ridiculously overpowered and will probably force you to reset the terrain on stages multiple times because you can render areas impassable, and I loved it. Except you do the vacuum by holding the button down, and often, instead of doing that, it will instead create a boulder out of the stuff stored in its trunk, which is done by tapping the button. And again, sometimes it’ll flip. Plus, you can combine those problems with the failure to register that you want to aim and throw the boulders you make, because that happens too. This game is a Russian nesting doll of mechanical failures.

By far the most unreliable power-ups were the snake’s double jump and the gorilla’s charge punch. The snake is one of those “always hopping” mechanics that Nintendo keeps going back to, like in Mario Wonder, and it’s NEVER fun and they will NEVER get the message on that and stop including it. It’s so unimaginative to begin with, but unlike Mario Wonder, it’s not really optional for large stretches of Bananza. You even have to fight a boss as the snake. The snake can also cause slow motion by holding a button down, but once again, sometimes it just doesn’t work the first couple attempts, and I often needed multiple attempts to do a simple double jump up a straight wall. What’s crazy is that, when you’re able to free-climb on a surface, it’s like a Spider-Man game that controls perfectly. It’s only when it does anything but the basic Donkey Kong moves that the game becomes janky.

All these issues make Donkey Kong Bananza probably the worst controlling 3D platformer Nintendo has done in several generations. By far the worst of any game I actually overall enjoyed. The Gorilla Bananza power-up, which is like a beefy version of Donkey Kong, has a charge punch. Just hold the B-button down and he’ll blink and then you can throw a punch for more damage. Except half the time, it doesn’t do it. It does something else. I don’t even know what, but not the charge punch. Even late in the game, when I was trying to charge-up the punch, I’d have to press and hold it again maybe two or three times before it worked. It really felt like maxing-out the upgrades for it didn’t help or maybe even made it more prone to failure. I know video game fans don’t like to wait for anything, but Bananza would have been so much better with another year or so of polish. There are dozens of moments, if not hundreds, where the game feels like a rough prototype. And the controls aren’t even as rough as some of the mechanics. Take the muck, for example. See this?

It’s called “muck” and the final proper, Mario Odyssey-like level is themed around a theme park that got covered in it. It’s kind of like Mario Sunshine, except instead of having an easy-to-refill hose to wash it off, you have to pick up piles of salt and throw it at the muck, which will clear a tiny amount of it. You have to do this one pile at a time. That would be bad enough if it worked, but it doesn’t. Even no-questions-asked direct hits don’t always work. I don’t know if it’s because there’s a microscopic piece of debris in the way. I think that’s what has to be happening. Maybe they shouldn’t have been as stingy as they are with how much muck a handful of salt can clear. For muck without an enemy in it, one pile doesn’t do a lot. On its face value, it slows the game to a crawl IF it worked 100% as intended, and would have been a bad idea on its own. But it’s like the Nintendo Switch 2 can’t handle the idea of this pile of salt you pick up disintegrating into thousands of particles that evaporate the muck. If ANYTHING is in front of it, the whole pile you threw is lost. This was especially problematic with fossils that were embedded in it. Even trying to throw around the fossil and carve it out would just leave the damn thing suspended in air. I can’t believe they included this whole mechanic in the game. (shrug) It doesn’t work! I don’t know how else to say it! It doesn’t f*cking work, at least good enough to be used as much as it is.

Enemies and bosses can be the same way, too. Larger ones are covered in layers of one of the materials that you can dig through (usually whichever material dominates the level layout) and if you throw something at them, it’s never consistent from one throw to the next how much shield you’ll peel off. Sometimes a direct hit goes right through them and removes their shield, and other times it might just make a tiny little dent in it. There were a lot of instances where their shields would be incredibly misshapen from all the crap I’d thrown at them, but they were still alive and attacking because the direct hits weren’t registering the full damage to the “suit” the skeleton underneath it was wearing. It’s a very janky, inconsistent game that, frankly, often makes the Switch 2 feel less powerful. Like, in 2025, it kind of feels like this texture-based gameplay should be further along than this.

And then there’s the finale. After chasing around Void Kong and his minions the entire game, and Void Kong is NEVER a satisfactory boss to battle with, at least compared to the massive bosses that buffer him, something weird happens. The game has a proper, satisfying enough ending, and even made me laugh. Donkey Kong gets trapped in the purple crap, and it’s pretty funny looking. My brain played the sad version “Frosty the Snowman” and I was in tears, howling with laughter.

But then Pauline sings him free, and that’s a good, proper ending to the game. It’s how the game started. First Pauline was covered in the purple crap during the tutorial stage, then DK was, and now they know their power and their wish can come true. Void Kong is defeated, peace and returns to the layers, and we reached the Infinity Banana, which grants wishes to whoever gets to it. It’s the Triforce of bananas, apparently. Those last couple hours were pretty bad, but overall, Donkey Kong Bananza was a really fun game.

But then this happens.

Excuse me, what?

What the f*ck? Yeah, the “Root” exists but the thing you think was the root was King K. Rool’s tummy. This wasn’t set up at all leading up to this. What follows is another level that sucks and is nothing like the Mario Odyssey-like adventure I had loved for the first couple dozen hours of gameplay. Also, now the big enemies that once had skeletons inside them are housing the Kremlings inside of them instead.

And then you eventually find King K. Rool and the Banana of Destiny and you fight. Well, the best thing I can say about the King K. Rool battle is that it’s a much better fight than I expected. I think the last boss in Donkey Kong Country is a BORING boss fight (frankly none of the bosses in Donkey Kong Country 1 are fun) but this time, he’s a proper big boss, unlike the lame Void Kong battles. It’s one of those “knock the thing they shoot back at them” fights. And hey, I got one last reminder that the Gorilla Bananza’s charge punch, which is the only thing that will knock his cannonballs back at him, just f*cking refuses to activate half the time, so that was nice. One final reminder that this is the least polished major Nintendo game in decades.

But then you win that battle, get the Root, and the game IS over. Pauline wished to return to the surface. Donkey Kong wished for bananas. Awesome. The game is finally over! It sucks that they added one terrible level to an already sloggy ending sequence, but it’s finally done. You have the Banana Root or whatever and you make your wish, the Banana Root blows its load and launches you and her up to the surface. Roll the credits. I mean, surely they’re not going to do the fake end credits thing like in Donkey Kong Country and then have the game continue even further.

Oh no.

My God. Okay, so after an extended cut scene that is clearly the ending, somehow King K. Rool shoots up this banana geyser you’ve been riding to the surface and ANOTHER final battle happens. Each of these final battles has been little more than a reminder of how haphazard DKB’s gameplay is. In this battle, you have to pick up chunks of the geyser and throw them at King K. Rool. You hold down the “grab a chunk” button” to bring up cross hairs to aim, assuming it works. It often doesn’t, like every other mechanic in the game. Sometimes I just couldn’t get the aiming crosshairs to work. Also, this is a battle that goes for the “make you fall off the edge and use a balloon” knock-outs. Awesome.

Thankfully, after five or six hits, King K. Rool is defeated FOR GOOD THIS TIME and…… wait, after all that, HE gets the Banana Root and it instantly gives him his wish to take over New Donk City? MOTHER F*CKER are you kidding me? How come MY wishes don’t work as fast as his? I think this root is evil!

And there’s even a new title screen!

I wanted to cry. And it’s YET ANOTHER terrible stage. It’s short at least, but actually, it’s also the worst part of the entire game because it’s got fast-rising, instakill lava. No time to enjoy the level design. Run for it, or you will die and have to start over from the last barrel you reached. Also there’s thorns and life-sucking hot rocks everywhere and enemies are still going for that one-shot knockout. It’s just the worst. And then, after all that, it’s essentially the same “knock the cannonballs back at King K. Rool” battle as before, only he uses the Banana Root to make him look like this:

Right before I finished this boss, I had to pause the game to ask “what the hell am I doing?” Seriously! I hadn’t had even a tiny amount of fun with Donkey Kong Bananza in several hours at this point. Everything I’d loved about the level design and themes and exploration had long since ended, yet the game just refused to stop. I was happy fighting the main villains, but then suddenly Nintendo lost their nerve to not get drunk on nostalgia and switched out the new cast for the old cast. It’s Avengers: Doomsday a year ahead of schedule! So, back to the same old boss Donkey Kong has been fighting for decades, and they didn’t even give him good levels. One of the DLC packs is apparently based on Donkey Kong Country. Why wasn’t THAT the final level? If you’re going to bring back King K. Rool, put him in the Donkey Kong Country level! F*cking lame. At least this time, it was the real ending. You beat King K. Rool, Pauline says she’ll learn to keep the beat without DK beating his chest, and he returns back to his world. Yes! The credits! It’s finally over!

“Three months later…”

Nope. I’m good.

Okay, so I’m disappointed that Donkey Kong Bananza had a terrible end game. I figured it would be like Mario Odyssey where I’d be joyously knocking out the much harder post-game content, but nah, I’m okay with never playing this again. Hell, I didn’t even pick up the post-game banana. That was my middle finger to a game that forgot that it’s supposed to be fun. All my interest in the post-game content or the DLC was reduced to zilch by one terrible level after another to close out what had been an overall rough but amazing game. Again, by raw ratio of good-to-bad, Donkey Kong Bananza is an automatic YES! Maybe if DKB had been a heavily story-based game, like an RPG, bungling the finale like this could ruin the overall game. But it’s a platformer, and most of the levels were huge, heavy in content, and pretty damn fun. Even the ice level had some damn clever stuff in it.

There’s a million reviews out there that talk about the positive aspects of Donkey Kong Bananza, so I’ll sum up my experience by noting that, by my count, there’s eighteen levels in the standard game, assuming New Donk City counts as a level. After being pretty dang bored with opening tutorial stage (Ingot Isle), which has a bland mine setting and doesn’t feature the geocaching-like search for bananas and fossils that I would become addicted to, the next eleven levels, starting with “Lagoon Layer” and ending with “Racing Layer” were the Mario Odyssey sequel I’d waited nearly a decade for. Not all of those are full-sized levels, but it doesn’t matter. For all the camera sloppiness, clunky controls, and mechanical failures, I’d LOVED Donkey Kong Bananza and was making an effort to get every single banana and every single fossil, because it was bliss and possibly my favorite game of the last five years. Other than that sprawling Void Kong fight, it’s a damn fun, damn charming game for that eleven level stretch.

The game didn’t really start to get bad until after the racing level, the “Radiance Layer” which became the point where I was ready for the game to start wrapping-up. The snake mechanic was introduced and was horrible. There’s large segments where you have to pick up blocks made of light that quickly fade away. It just wasn’t a very fun level at all, at least until the home stretch. Then the “Groove Layer” takes away your ability to transform and the digging/exploration is largely removed. It’s a HORRIBLY boring level, and that was pretty much the end of Donkey Kong Bananza as a good game. The next level, the Feast Layer, is the salt-on-muck level that, frankly, I think is terrible. It’s tragic, too, because Feast Layer’s level design was outstanding. It could have been the best level in the game if the salt/muck mechanics worked, but they don’t. That wouldn’t matter if the level design didn’t rely so heavily on eliminating that muck, but it’s literally the main hook of the stage, and it’s so bad that I can’t believe this was released in this state. There’s nothing worse than picking up a clump of salt, aiming carefully, hitting the muck you were aiming for DEAD ON and having f*cking nothing happen. Thus the potential best stage in the game is rendered not even fun at all.

The two full-sized levels that followed were boring, and the New Donk City finale with the rising lava was even worse. In a game based around exploration and discovery, they close things out with a fast-moving instakill sprint. A completely nonsensical idea barely less silly than ending Legend of Zelda with a game of football. But, none of the bad stuff undoes everything that came before it. I paid $70 for this. Did I get $70 worth of entertainment? Easily. And I’m not even mad that the game didn’t end sooner. I’m not arrogant enough to think that most fans won’t disagree with me. They’ll probably LOVE the entire King K. Rool sequence, and I’m happy for them. Hell, I envy them, because my Donkey Kong Bananza experience went from being certain I still had weeks worth of post-game content I’d be eating up to deleting Bananza from my Switch 2 while my sister played “Grounds for Divorce” by Elbow.
Verdict: YES!