Donkey Kong Bananza review: "Destruction isn't just a flashy gimmick for the Minecraft generation, it's one of the best inventions Nintendo has had in years"

Smashing things is fun, and Donkey Kong Bananza understands that fact better than any other video game I've ever played. Forget about "See that mountain? You can go there." Now it's "See that mountain? You can obliterate it." Bananza's destruction isn't just a flashy gimmick for the Minecraft generation, it's one of the best inventions Nintendo has had in years.

If you've played Super Mario Odyssey, you'll recognize its DNA in Donkey Kong Bananza. You'll wander around vast levels completing challenges to grab a central collectable – in this case, crystalline bananas – and items that let you unlock outfits that give you a unique look appropriate for each world. The difference is that instead of hopping all over a level's surface to find those items, you'll now be smashing your way through rock and dirt to find them.

You play as Donkey Kong, paired up with a version of Pauline far younger than we've seen her in the past, lost somewhere beneath the planet's surface. To fulfill our heroes' dual dreams of "returning home" and "eating every banana," you've got to journey to the center of the earth, pursuing a crew of new ape villains. The story isn't the main draw here, but it is a surprisingly compelling extra hook, and the slowly developing friendship between Pauline and DK becomes downright endearing over the plot's twists and turns.

Hey, DK, you awake?

Smashing the world is Donkey Kong Bananza's primary attraction. The Nintendo Switch 2 face buttons let you jump, punch up, punch down, and punch forward, and those basic actions will carry you through most of the game. Dig down into ground, punch your way forward to carve a tunnel, and smash up to claw your way back out again. There are a few other abilities, too, and while pretty much all of your moves are unlocked from the start, Bananza does a great job of slowly unfolding those mechanics to you over the first few worlds, offering a satisfying sense of progression without actually locking the cool, fun toys away.

You do have to unlock Bananza Transformations, which see DK turn into big, super-powered animals ranging from an ostrich to a much bigger-than-usual gorilla. These abilities let you do things like glide across big gaps or punch straight through concrete, and while not every one is a winner, the good ones are very satisfying to use. One transformation, which I won't spoil here, had me in disbelief that the game was actually giving me an ability so powerful.

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Levels have a sort of indestructible skeleton at their heart, but that simply gives you a place to stand if you'd otherwise be digging yourself into the void. (You can see an example of how thoroughly you can destroy a level in the images above.) If you want to raze every recognizable surface to the ground, you can absolutely feel free to do so – and, in fact, that's a pretty viable strategy if you want to make sure you don't miss a single collectable. With so much to find, from the big bananas to the explosions of gold fragments that satisfyingly clink into your inventory, it feels like you're constantly being rewarded for digging.

The joy of blasting a tunnel through a mountain, looking back, and admiring your own mark on the world is pretty self-explanatory, but incredibly it never really gets old. That's thanks largely to wonderful level design that keeps the smashing varied. One stage will have you leaping across trees separated by poison water, tossing seeds around that'll sprout into big leafy platforms that bridge the gaps. Another might have you punching out magical pieces of terrain that'll then reappear in another position, creating a stairway to your next objective. Yet another level could be built around a weird material which, when you rip off a chunk of it, will send you jetting into the sky.

Oh, banana

While all these twists give each level its own flavor, they never feel constraining. In fact, from the earliest hours of the game to the final stages, I found myself so unconstrained that I'd consistently blast past each level's breadcrumb trail while exploring other pathways. Sure, that guy at the level entrance mentioned something about a big, labyrinthine path to reach the other side, but… well, who needs all that platforming when you can just dig there?

This all forms a wild new direction for a Donkey Kong game, but for the nostalgic purists among us – I assure you, I am one – it still feels like part of the series. You'll hear new mixes of classic tracks going back to the Rareware-era, the constant refrain of DK64's "oh, banana," and even a handful of 2D challenge stages paying explicit tribute to the most memorable levels of the SNES games. There are some pretty deep-cut references in here that absolutely tickled the kid in me who was obsessed with Donkey Kong Country in the '90s.

Donkey Kong Bananza also has probably the best form yet of Nintendo's now-standard asynchronous co-op mode. Here, 'player two' grabs a joy-con to give Pauline a dragonborn-style shouting power, pointing a cursor around with mouse controls and belting out words that manifest as big chunks of material that can smash the world just as effectively as DK's fists. You can grab material types with a sort of Photoshop eyedropper tool, and then blast the world with stone or explosives with a click. It's similar to the modes we've had in Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Odyssey, but here the second player can actually have a real effect on the world. The added power makes boss fights perhaps a bit too easy, but it's great fun for both players regardless.

My only gripes with Donkey Kong Bananza are that the camera can occasionally struggle to show the action when you dig deep underground, and that performance on Switch 2 can occasionally take a dive when there's a whole lot happening on-screen. Neither issue is particularly commonplace, but it does happen just frequently enough to be annoying, and the framerate issues are particularly troublesome in boss battles.

Yet even with those issues in mind, I absolutely loved the roughly 25 hours I spent seeing Donkey Kong Bananza through to its end credits, and I can't wait to drop back in to go for 100% completion. Nintendo's brought Minecraft and Mario together in an incredible combo that pays tribute to DK's past, and it's a genuine must-play for Switch 2 owners.