Donkey Kong Bananza is the best Hulk game ever and makes me wish for the return of destruction-oriented sandboxes

"See that mountain? You can climb it," Todd Howard infamously said while promoting Skyrim in 2011. Despite my love for that game, that turned out to be an exaggeration. Fast-forward to 2017 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild let us climb every mountain in the distance for real. Eight years later, Nintendo EPD 8 could've marketed Donkey Kong Bananza with "See that mountain? You can destroy it." That wouldn't be a lie.

As much as Bananza borrows from recent Nintendo hits such as the last two 3D Zeldas, Super Mario Odyssey (same dev team), and even Splatoon 3's campaign mode, its core design philosophy feels more attuned with that of sandboxes of old like The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, Prototype, and Mercenaries. Hell, in the absence of a new Hulk game that embraces the 'HULK SMASH' power fantasy, Donkey Kong Bananza might be the best unofficial Hulk game we've had so far.

It's easy to see why so many studios over the last 20 years or so have adopted GTA, Assassin's Creed or The Elder Scrolls as tried-and-tested blueprints. After all, they're perfect fits for almost every single-player fictional world you can think of. That's half the work done, a godsend for most developers who struggle to even get a pitch past the prototype (not the game) phase.

Break stuff

We can say 'too much of a good thing' is a genuine concern in the games industry right now though. Even after learning Assassin's Creed Shadows has been a certified hit and as everyone prepares for GTA 6's world-shaking launch next year, there's a consensus (often backed by shocking data like the first-ever Star Wars open-world game underperforming) that we crossed the point of 'there are too many open-world games being made' a while ago. In the continuous chase of long-term player engagement, the sort of linear action-adventure which, for example, Naughty Dog mastered with Uncharted has become an incredibly rare occurrence in the AAA space.

This doesn't mean we need to adopt the extremist 'open worlds need to die, actually' position that's increasingly common these days. No, they aren't going anywhere, and they don't need to. A possible solution to most developers and publishers' big dilemma is... offering different flavors of open worlds beyond the coat of paint. Folks are having similar thoughts about the FPS genre, but every now and then, something comes out that breaks the mold. Looking at games which are giant sandboxes – sci-fi, fantasy, realistic, or whatever – the situation is more dire. But Donkey Kong Bananza may have unwittingly made a huge push to save the genre from itself.

Back when many developers were trying to make their version of Grand Theft Auto (the mid-2000s), studios like Radical Entertainment and Pandemic Studios went the opposite direction with all the newfound freedom and structural possibilities that had just opened up: Bigger playgrounds meant bigger destruction, depth and realistic world simulations be damned. I mean, the first Mercenaries was literally titled Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction; the best (official) Hulk game ever went with 'Ultimate Destruction' as the subtitle. "See this city? You can completely level it."

Well, okay, maybe Mercenaries didn't fully get there until its (otherwise disappointing) 2008 sequel, but Pandemic was dead-set on putting chaos over everything else in both Mercenaries and its Destroy All Humans games. As for The Incredible Hulk, Radical cooked so much with that previously unseen power fantasy that Prototype, an all-new original superhero (villain?) IP, was born.

Sure, there were stories to follow and more than a few shared strands of DNA, but this group of action-oriented sandboxes were all about the thrill of bending the game worlds to your will through extreme, overwhelming violence. I'm also tempted to bring up Just Cause – a series that somehow survived into the eighth generation of consoles – yet it could ultimately be reduced to a GTA-type of sandbox with extra pyrotechnics and tools.

Though Donkey Kong isn't presented as an antihero or villain in Bananza, his schtick from the get-go is... punching through obstacles and the world itself. Platforming is for suckers, a last resort. 'First, let's try to break the thing in front of me into little pieces.' Same goes for his poor foes: They're gonna be punched or stoned relentlessly before a second strategy is even considered. Leave the complex acrobatics to Mario. Sure, this oversimplifies the full scope and intent of the game (its puzzles and challenges are nice changes of pace), but at its core, Donkey Kong Bananza posits that, sometimes, it's fun to just break the world apart in order to save it... and obtain delicious Banandium. Alex Mercer didn't care about turning New York City into a battlefield either.

Few of us expected Nintendo EPD 8 (and the bigger company) to change its tune this substantially following the success of Super Mario Odyssey, but it's the sort of genre-shaking shift that more publishers should look into while continuing to refresh famous properties. Mario and Link's latest adventures won't be the blueprint for every family-friendly icon in Nintendo's massive portfolio. That's a relief, no doubt, but the bigger implication is this Kong-sized success might remind veteran studios and rights-holders that 'going apeshit' is the most video game-y and easy-to-sell pitch you can think of.

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