i want to preface this review by saying, i used the tag anywhere mod. i know there's a separate entry on the site for that mod but i wanna talk about it here sorry! i'll mention the mod throughout the review i'm sure but i wanted the main mention to be here because i wanna talk about the game as it was intended to be played, not with a mod that greatly fixes the biggest problem with it.
i wanna start out with what i liked/at least didn't entirely hate here because there's a lot! first of all, god i love DK and everything about the franchise. it's such a fun aesthetic and i just adore these characters with my whole heart. there's so much charm oozing out of everything in this game, i prefer the general look and feel over rares other collectathons easily. the atmosphere here is fucking phenomenal and i wasn't expecting it to be that great. it's for sure the cause of some performance bumps but it's just so damn good for an n64 game. it's especially great in the boss fights.
i also generally liked the controls here! every kong felt unique but still fun to control, and i was never really dreading having to use any kong. i will say, banjo feels better and that mainly comes down to how slippery everyone feels. this game way more than the banjo games tries to get you to do tight platforming and it's incredibly difficult because of how slippery each kong feels. they all had moves and attacks that made a lot of sense to be specific to them and made them feel special, although i will say every air attack was god awful. coming from banjo i tried to use them so often and the hit detection on them is so terrible. in general though i found them fun to control and liked using the various moves/abilities of each kong.
the OST obviously is great here, it's filled with classic donkey kong tracks and theyr'e all amazing. grant kirkhope and david wise are some of my all time favorite video game composers the things they've done in their respective donkey kong/rare games are nothing short of amazing.
the worlds are all great here too, i don't think any of them hit the heights of peak banjo world design, but none of them are bad by any means. the hub world is probably the weakest, and while i still liked it i found it to be too big and open for its own good. it's really the only place i felt the kongs felt slow, because the rest of the worlds are tightly packed enough. every world had a fun theme, and were filled with mostly cool/interesting things to do in them. i almost never found myself confused/lost on a missing collectable everything is conveyed well and the worlds aren't so overwhelming (cough cough banjo-tooie) that i felt annoyed looking around for some missing bananas. i do wish you teamed up as the kongs a bit more, the final level does it really well! with the kong swapping mechanic being the way that it is though it's probably for the best you don't.
one of the biggest surprises from this game for me, was how solid these bosses were! i mentioned it before, but the atmosphere of these bosses was so wonderful. the bosses genuinely felt massive and intimidating and the atmosphere of the bosses rooms were major factor in that. every boss felt so grand and intense, tinys boss in particular genuinely felt creepy! the design was so cool and the environment you fought him in was so good. the 5th and especially 6th bosses are reused, which is a bummer but i think they change it up enough to feel interesting. at least the 5th one, refighting the fire dragon as chunky and going huge to punch the shit out of him was super badass. refighting the armadillo as DK was a bit less fun but still not terrible. they all had some solid challenge to them, and almost every concept was interesting. lankys boat boss is another standout. the k rool fight at the end especially felt really cool! the k rool boss having you cycle through all 5 kongs for each phase felt super cool and rewarding, and i loved the boxing theme for it.
i also just wanted to mention, even though it's really small, i liked the QoL stuff this game had. it's weird how banjo felt like it digressed in this regard but being able to restart mini games from the pause menu, or press "exit level" at any point in the level and keep your progress was really nice and felt very modern.
now, unfortunately for the negative. holy shit i know it's been beaten into the ground but it's truly baffling how the kong swapping mechanic functions the way that it does. i played with the swap anywhere mod, but in the back of my mind i was constantly thinking about how fucking terrible and obnoxious it would be to have to deal with using kong barrels. for the record i played a short bit of the game a while ago without the mod, and it was so annoying i quit and it only got worse further in the game! there are so many collectables that genuinely feel like fuck yous in the way they're placed. this game feels so designed around being able to insta swap, i don't know if that was ever a concept thrown around but this game needed to not be released until that idea was thought of and executed on holy shit. it's less of an issue if you're just going for any%, and while i think that's fair to say and i generally don't like using "but 100%!!!" as an argument, but i think in collectathons the idea of 100%ing the game is so inherently built around the idea of doing that. if you do the bare minimum golden bananas required to beat this game you skip out on 50% of the golden bananas that exist. that's a whole lot of the game! compared that to something like crash 4, which i feel has absurd and obnoxious 100% requirements, i can more easily forgive that since you're not missing out on such a large chunk of the game by not doing it. i continued to be baffled at how anyone would put themselves through 100%ing this game without the mod, and how they shipped this game with the swap mechanic being the way it was. there's so many solutions here, let every kong pick up any color of banana. u can keep specific golden bananas locked to the specific kong if you need their abilities to get it but the coins and bananas being locked to them as well is just fucking insane. the obvious best solution is use the tag anywhere mod, which makes the game a 100x better experience. i know i'm beating a dead horse talking about how bad this is, but it's honestly one of the more baffling game design decisions i've experienced and it hurts so much more because underneath that it's a game i very honestly adore.
aside from the kong swapping bullshit, i do have a couple other more minor complaints i wanted to mention. i was originally going to put the bonus games in my positive section, because i did genuinely enjoy them for the most part but they run out of unique bonus rooms by like the second/third world so you're just replaying the same bonus rooms all the time. this wouldn't be so bad if there were just less of them, or if some of the bonus games weren't terrible like the push beavers into a hole one. i kind of include the minecart levels/various races in the bonus level category but they are a different thing. i generally liked these, but some of the later game ones were just bullshit instead of satisfyingly difficult. which is weird because i find this game strikes that balance really well generally but things like the donkey kong arcade game and the 2nd race with that bunny in fungi forest are just kind of bullshit and unfun. i did love the boat race, and the 2 tiny car races though! the slides were also super fun. i'm a sucker for randomly swapping gameplay like that, as long as it isn't egregiously stupid/frustrating and while most weren't, there were a few here that were terrible.
the performance was pretty rough too. i don't wanna say too much definitively since i emulated the game, so i don't know how much better/worse it was. but the entirety of creepy castle lags on the outside like the entire time and i felt like it should be mentioned a little bit.
i also didn't love how there wasn't really any indication for which kongs could get upgrades at the various tents. some are obvious, like when u first get a kong you know they can get their gun/at least 1 potion from cranky but otherwise you have to go in individually with each kong to check. some sign outside saying what upgrades where there or even them mentioning "hey i got nothing left for you, but send in your pal <kong> i got something for them!" would have been nice.
this complaint is extremely small, but i will say my brain doesn't love that when you feed the pigs bananas to access a boss room, you lose the bananas on your count in the level. the total obviously doesn't go down but running around a level with 75 diddy bananas in the top left even though i've collected all 100 kind of frustrated me the few times it happened. that's a very nitpicky thing but something that did bother me enough to want to mention it lol. i fixed this issue by just saving the bosses for absolute last but still bothered me.
donkey kong 64 is a phenomenal game if you're using the tag anywhere mod. i had a fucking amazing time here, i loved it as much if not more than kazooie! that being said, i wanna be a bit more objective and rate this based on how the actual game is and it's an incredibly frustrating and tedious experience. i still think it's fun and worthwhile, just significantly worse. it's insane how much a simple dpad kong swap mechanic makes this a wildly better video game but it really does. if you're interested in the game please play it via the swap anywhere mod it's an incredibly more fun experience. if this game got a banjo XBLA esque remaster where they officially had a swap mechanic similar to the mod i really think this game would be looked on extremely fondly. love u DK, hope you get another shot at 3d someday.
i wanna start out with what i liked/at least didn't entirely hate here because there's a lot! first of all, god i love DK and everything about the franchise. it's such a fun aesthetic and i just adore these characters with my whole heart. there's so much charm oozing out of everything in this game, i prefer the general look and feel over rares other collectathons easily. the atmosphere here is fucking phenomenal and i wasn't expecting it to be that great. it's for sure the cause of some performance bumps but it's just so damn good for an n64 game. it's especially great in the boss fights.
i also generally liked the controls here! every kong felt unique but still fun to control, and i was never really dreading having to use any kong. i will say, banjo feels better and that mainly comes down to how slippery everyone feels. this game way more than the banjo games tries to get you to do tight platforming and it's incredibly difficult because of how slippery each kong feels. they all had moves and attacks that made a lot of sense to be specific to them and made them feel special, although i will say every air attack was god awful. coming from banjo i tried to use them so often and the hit detection on them is so terrible. in general though i found them fun to control and liked using the various moves/abilities of each kong.
the OST obviously is great here, it's filled with classic donkey kong tracks and theyr'e all amazing. grant kirkhope and david wise are some of my all time favorite video game composers the things they've done in their respective donkey kong/rare games are nothing short of amazing.
the worlds are all great here too, i don't think any of them hit the heights of peak banjo world design, but none of them are bad by any means. the hub world is probably the weakest, and while i still liked it i found it to be too big and open for its own good. it's really the only place i felt the kongs felt slow, because the rest of the worlds are tightly packed enough. every world had a fun theme, and were filled with mostly cool/interesting things to do in them. i almost never found myself confused/lost on a missing collectable everything is conveyed well and the worlds aren't so overwhelming (cough cough banjo-tooie) that i felt annoyed looking around for some missing bananas. i do wish you teamed up as the kongs a bit more, the final level does it really well! with the kong swapping mechanic being the way that it is though it's probably for the best you don't.
one of the biggest surprises from this game for me, was how solid these bosses were! i mentioned it before, but the atmosphere of these bosses was so wonderful. the bosses genuinely felt massive and intimidating and the atmosphere of the bosses rooms were major factor in that. every boss felt so grand and intense, tinys boss in particular genuinely felt creepy! the design was so cool and the environment you fought him in was so good. the 5th and especially 6th bosses are reused, which is a bummer but i think they change it up enough to feel interesting. at least the 5th one, refighting the fire dragon as chunky and going huge to punch the shit out of him was super badass. refighting the armadillo as DK was a bit less fun but still not terrible. they all had some solid challenge to them, and almost every concept was interesting. lankys boat boss is another standout. the k rool fight at the end especially felt really cool! the k rool boss having you cycle through all 5 kongs for each phase felt super cool and rewarding, and i loved the boxing theme for it.
i also just wanted to mention, even though it's really small, i liked the QoL stuff this game had. it's weird how banjo felt like it digressed in this regard but being able to restart mini games from the pause menu, or press "exit level" at any point in the level and keep your progress was really nice and felt very modern.
now, unfortunately for the negative. holy shit i know it's been beaten into the ground but it's truly baffling how the kong swapping mechanic functions the way that it does. i played with the swap anywhere mod, but in the back of my mind i was constantly thinking about how fucking terrible and obnoxious it would be to have to deal with using kong barrels. for the record i played a short bit of the game a while ago without the mod, and it was so annoying i quit and it only got worse further in the game! there are so many collectables that genuinely feel like fuck yous in the way they're placed. this game feels so designed around being able to insta swap, i don't know if that was ever a concept thrown around but this game needed to not be released until that idea was thought of and executed on holy shit. it's less of an issue if you're just going for any%, and while i think that's fair to say and i generally don't like using "but 100%!!!" as an argument, but i think in collectathons the idea of 100%ing the game is so inherently built around the idea of doing that. if you do the bare minimum golden bananas required to beat this game you skip out on 50% of the golden bananas that exist. that's a whole lot of the game! compared that to something like crash 4, which i feel has absurd and obnoxious 100% requirements, i can more easily forgive that since you're not missing out on such a large chunk of the game by not doing it. i continued to be baffled at how anyone would put themselves through 100%ing this game without the mod, and how they shipped this game with the swap mechanic being the way it was. there's so many solutions here, let every kong pick up any color of banana. u can keep specific golden bananas locked to the specific kong if you need their abilities to get it but the coins and bananas being locked to them as well is just fucking insane. the obvious best solution is use the tag anywhere mod, which makes the game a 100x better experience. i know i'm beating a dead horse talking about how bad this is, but it's honestly one of the more baffling game design decisions i've experienced and it hurts so much more because underneath that it's a game i very honestly adore.
aside from the kong swapping bullshit, i do have a couple other more minor complaints i wanted to mention. i was originally going to put the bonus games in my positive section, because i did genuinely enjoy them for the most part but they run out of unique bonus rooms by like the second/third world so you're just replaying the same bonus rooms all the time. this wouldn't be so bad if there were just less of them, or if some of the bonus games weren't terrible like the push beavers into a hole one. i kind of include the minecart levels/various races in the bonus level category but they are a different thing. i generally liked these, but some of the later game ones were just bullshit instead of satisfyingly difficult. which is weird because i find this game strikes that balance really well generally but things like the donkey kong arcade game and the 2nd race with that bunny in fungi forest are just kind of bullshit and unfun. i did love the boat race, and the 2 tiny car races though! the slides were also super fun. i'm a sucker for randomly swapping gameplay like that, as long as it isn't egregiously stupid/frustrating and while most weren't, there were a few here that were terrible.
the performance was pretty rough too. i don't wanna say too much definitively since i emulated the game, so i don't know how much better/worse it was. but the entirety of creepy castle lags on the outside like the entire time and i felt like it should be mentioned a little bit.
i also didn't love how there wasn't really any indication for which kongs could get upgrades at the various tents. some are obvious, like when u first get a kong you know they can get their gun/at least 1 potion from cranky but otherwise you have to go in individually with each kong to check. some sign outside saying what upgrades where there or even them mentioning "hey i got nothing left for you, but send in your pal <kong> i got something for them!" would have been nice.
this complaint is extremely small, but i will say my brain doesn't love that when you feed the pigs bananas to access a boss room, you lose the bananas on your count in the level. the total obviously doesn't go down but running around a level with 75 diddy bananas in the top left even though i've collected all 100 kind of frustrated me the few times it happened. that's a very nitpicky thing but something that did bother me enough to want to mention it lol. i fixed this issue by just saving the bosses for absolute last but still bothered me.
donkey kong 64 is a phenomenal game if you're using the tag anywhere mod. i had a fucking amazing time here, i loved it as much if not more than kazooie! that being said, i wanna be a bit more objective and rate this based on how the actual game is and it's an incredibly frustrating and tedious experience. i still think it's fun and worthwhile, just significantly worse. it's insane how much a simple dpad kong swap mechanic makes this a wildly better video game but it really does. if you're interested in the game please play it via the swap anywhere mod it's an incredibly more fun experience. if this game got a banjo XBLA esque remaster where they officially had a swap mechanic similar to the mod i really think this game would be looked on extremely fondly. love u DK, hope you get another shot at 3d someday.