#Donkeykong country 3 series

The world map is also the best it's ever been, with the different vehicles you collect allowing you to search for hidden caves in its vast mass. There are also some super-neat ideas thrown into the soup, like Parry the parrot - an animal buddy who moves when you do and must be kept alive for secret bonuses. For one thing, it's gorgeous - the apex of the DKC graphical style and one of the very best-looking SNES games in existence. It's a flawed game, but there's plenty about it that I like. Now, I realise that I said it's underappreciated and then proceeded to slag it off remorselessly. That empty little beach just below the Kongs looks suspicious. Additionally, the bonus barrels are back and this time they have stultifyingly dull challenges where you have to collect green bananas as they slowly appear around a small room, usually with a single obstacle. It really wasn't worth compromising the level design to incorporate this extremely stupid and misguided concept. While the giant DK coins return from 2, their previously-ingenious hideaways are rather spoiled by the fact that, ooh, new idea, they're now carried by an enemy called Koin who uses them as a shield, so you have to find a keg, rebound it off a wall and hit them in the back. The secrets - so important in the first two Donkey Kong Countrys - are lacklustre, too. For every fun gimmick like a giant saw tearing through the treetops as you escape vertically, there's a boring underwater stage that requires you to awkwardly position yourself to feed a fish that bites you if you leave its stomach empty. It's an approach that definitely spurs the player to want to keep going and see what the designers will throw at you next, but all too often it's something a little uninspired. In what's admittedly a continuation of the previous game's creeping design ethos, every stage here seems to be built around some sort of one-off gimmick.

Ellie here doesn't even scrape the top ten videogame elephants, a list of which I will produce before I die. The simpler levels are an order of magnitude less interesting than even the most basic stages in the original DKC, with the initial wharf-set level hardly stimulating the fun-neurons in the same way as DKC's rollicking, atmospheric jungle or DKC2's creaking, sloshing pirate ship. Oddly, considering it's part of a series about clothed primates, it feels like DKC3 is pitched young, with newcomer Kiddy Kong being the most glaring evidence of this. It's also markedly less complicated in its level designs than DKC2, which can occasionally lead it to feel somewhat uninspired.

#Donkeykong country 3 series

After the excitement of the original Donkey Kong Country and its beloved sequel, the third in the series feels a little bit like old news. See more of my work at ĭonkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble (takes deep breath) is a bit of an underappreciated and oft-maligned game.