It's impressive to me that each sequel to the original Donkey Kong is not only weaker than the original, but also incredibly dull. There is a reason why you don't hear much about Stanley and his fight with Donkey Kong, and that's because the game just isn't interesting to any degree.

While I appreciate the change of genre for the series, from platformer to shoot'em up; largely the game just has no creative level direction to it. Each level is nearly identical in look and feel, and the only real change is the top part making it harder to hit Donkey Kong. The game's premise also being shooting Donkey Kong up the butt in order to knock him into a beehive is also surprisingly unsatisfying. This mainly comes from two problems, the amount of effort you have to put into knocking DK into a beehive, and the repetitive nature the gameplay has. You also have the option to defend your flowers from the various bees and bugs DK is sending you, but you mostly just lose points if they get them. This means that if you care about points you'll engage in defending your flowers, but for the rest of us, this simply isn't worth it. See, the other crux to this game is that it's set on a pretty small timer, and the longer you take to knock DK in the beehive, the more time and points you waste. Adding this in with how hard DK is to knock up, makes for the main concentration of the game on a narrow platform right below DK. There is nothing to really incentive the player to protect the plants or engage with the rest of the level aside from avoiding death. Even a simple change of pressing a button to activate something or the plants giving you power ups if you save them all would have been enough. Sadly, DK3 just doesn't think past it's one idea and never expands on how it could have been better.