Donkey Kong Country Returns HD review - a formidable platformer that still holds up today
Mod Kongs.
It feels strange to be seeing out the twilight months of the Switch with an HD remaster of a Wii game from 15 years ago, but such is the position we find ourselves in with the launch of Donkey Kong Country Returns HD. Originally made by the folks at Retro Studios and now remastered by prolific Switch publisher and porting house Forever Entertainment, this challenging 2D platformer is itself an attempt to recapture DK's glory days from the SNES, making this something of a double dip in the rose-tinted pools of nostalgia.
But having played Returns at the time, and again when it came to the 3DS in 2013, it is still somewhat heartening to realise that, yes, this wasn't just a great platformer in its own right a decade and a half ago - it remains a cracking platformer even now, standing the test of time with its demanding athleticism, pitch-perfect timing and warrens of devious secrets. Viewed in isolation, this is as worth playing today as it ever was, and a stark reminder of just what a great Donkey Kong Country game can be.
However, it's so rare we can view things in isolation these days, and it feels doubly strange to be returning to this when its superior sequel, Tropical Freeze, was ported to the Switch back in 2018 (and still costs a sizeable £50 like Returns HD does). Back then, we were just over a year into the Switch's lifespan, but to bookend the console with its simplified and slightly drabber-looking predecessor? You can't help but feel the two games should have arrived the other way round, and if I had to pick one DKC game to play for £50 at the end of a console generation, it would be Tropical Freeze, no questions asked.
Still, let's not get ahead of ourselves unnecessarily. As I said, there's plenty to recommend Returns HD on its own merits, especially since it incorporates some of the 3DS version's added extras, such as its more forgiving difficulty mode where players have extra health and items, and more besides. And right from the off, Returns HD pulls no punches when it comes to putting players through their paces, requiring a dextrous understanding of Donkey Kong and Diddy's respective abilities and limitations to tackle rigorous run-and-jump gauntlets that surprise and delight in equal measure.
In some respects, the 3DS still feels like the more natural home for Returns. Particularly early on, DK will regularly barrel over to plunder bits of background scenery for collectible KONG letters and hidden puzzle pieces (the latter of which will gradually swell the ranks of the game's enormous sound and image libraries if all of them get rooted out in a single level). That scenery will also regularly cascade into the foreground too, as pillars of stone domino down a cliff face to bridge looming chasms before you, while kraken tentacles snake through narrow sea caves to block your path and pesky moles chuck deadly bombs from rival minecart tracks in crystal-encrusted tunnels.
It's a wonderful collision of the senses, your fingers flying by the seat of your Joy-Con buttons to keep up with the sights and sounds of being hurled at you from front and behind. A dynamic camera frames the action with a deft and elastic lens, pulling in close for tense and frenetic precision work, before zooming out to capture every last crumb of its ornately drawn spectacle. And it's all set to the bombastic tunes of David Wise's original soundtrack, reworked here by Aleksander Jastrzebski. This dramatic to-ing and fro-ing is a sensation that's by no means dulled on the Switch, but when most of my time was spent playing in handheld mode, it took me right back to cranking up the 3DS' stereoscopic slider to drink it all in.
I was also reminded just how much it leaves you to discover the finer nuances of its platforming, too. While handy tutorial pigs will occasionally pop up to tell you some basic controls - how to grab onto a vine, say, or slam DK's fists into the ground to break fractured scene furniture - lessons on how to apply some of its more advanced platforming techniques are never quite as forthcoming. I'll admit, I had 15 years of muscle memory to help me out here, and so I already knew that pressing jump again on enemy heads Mario & Luigi-style would let me gain extra height, while rolling would help me speed up to soar across larger gaps.
Some of this you'll inevitably learn by happy accident, as thankfully this is a world positively teeming with little moments of magic like this. Slamming a suspicious platform and having it flip to reveal a hidden barrel to one of its many secret rooms, for example, or crouching down to blow a puff of air, only for it to launch a tiny, barely noticeable propeller seed into the air with a bunch of bananas or puzzle piece in tow. Small, incidental actions like these make each and every level feel alive with wide-eyed possibility, and the way that knowledge then ripples out to the way you approach later levels on Kong Island remains one of Returns HD's greatest strengths.
The more likely scenario, however, is that you'll learn the bulk of these techniques the hard way - through grit and tears and by dying repeatedly to some of its most challenging platforming segments where precise application of these skills is your only route to success. Minecart levels - once the highlight of DKC games - are particularly bad for this, though curious banana and collectible placements do at least help to nudge you toward some kind of revelation, however frustrating. Still, when one foot wrong is often all that stands between you and a hasty restart, there are times when Returns HD can feel exasperatingly abstruse - something you might have hoped would have been ironed out for this remaster - and no amount of extra health in its lower difficulty mode will help to soften the blow here.
Purists will say this is par for course with Returns. It was, after all, notoriously difficult at launch, and remains so now, even for a triple-dipper such as myself. It is noticeably harder than most other platformers out there right from the get-go, though not insurmountable by any stretch - simply gathering bananas and coins to spend at Cranky Kong's shop to buy extra lives are more than plentiful enough to ensure you never actually see a true game over screen. Similarly, after several deaths in a row, those tutorial pigs will eventually offer to deploy the returning Super Guide function to skip you to the end as well (albeit at the cost of any collectibles you've gathered, and any remaining pride you have).
Persist through these aches and pains, however, and there's still an eminently satisfying platformer to be found underneath - one where mastery is frequently rewarded, and discovering its finer details elicits the best kind of glowing gratification. It remains a very good video game, even if it will inevitably feel like something of a step backward for those who have already played and loved Tropical Freeze, whose handsomer visuals and more ambitious set pieces easily trump this rather straightforward, no-frills remaster. If you missed it back in the day or simply can't resist the lure of nostalgia, there's still a good time to be had with Returns HD. But really, if you've yet to play either of Retro's DKC games at this stage in the Switch's lifecycle, you should probably just skip straight to Tropical Freeze. That's a Donkey Kong game at the peak of its powers, while Returns HD remains more of a warm-up act.
A copy of Donkey Kong Country Returns HD was provided for review by publisher Nintendo.