Donkey Kong Country 3 Review: Double the trouble, but half the fun (or less)

[Cross-posted from Wasting Your Life.]

So after conquering the first Donkey Kong Country last year, and re-conquering Diddy’s Kong Quest a short time after, I finally caved and bought the third and final game in the SNES trilogy, Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble, a few weeks ago. I just recently beat it.

To put it bluntly, I don’t think it’s a good game.

I didn’t like the first too much either. It could have been because I didn’t have nostalgia fueling me or it could have been for legitimate reasons, but I just thought it was a bland and frustrating (not in the good way) game. However, I gave it a pass because it was the first in the series.

To be fair, Diddy’s Kong Quest also has some of the control issues, but they seemed to be less prevalent, and the pirate theme actually worked really well for the game. The bosses were imaginative and fun (jumping hooks to escape a flaming sword ranks among my favorite boss battles ever), a huge improvement over the first. The level gimmicks (and I use that term affectionately) were well designed, like hopping the hot air balloons in a lava level. And of course the music was the best the series has ever had.

So for the third, even if I knew the music wasn’t going to be as good, I at least hoped the gameplay would continue the upward trend. Instead, it’s now clear to me Rare’s Kong games peaked with 2, with 3 a downgrade leading into Donkey Kong 64.

So what are my specific issues with it?

Well, let me just say, I love platformers and on the level of “hey, another 2D platformer to play” it was OK. The world map was pretty neat, if completely unnecessary and only adding to the “collect-a-thon” stigma Rare became known for.

However some parts of the overworld are just poorly thought out. In Razor Ridge, for instance, traversing the ski lift splitting the world into two halves is just a complete chore to use, moreso because Wrinkly’s Save Cave in that world is in the first half. If you didn’t know the autosave cheat and are a stickler for saving, you’d be spending about a quarter of your time not playing the levels in the world – just going back and forth to the save cave.

A big contributor to that is the Brother Bears and their dialogue. And in fact, dialogue in general is much more proficient in this game than in almost any 2D platformer I’ve ever played. It takes around 20 “skip text” button presses during and after the final boss battle. It’s just bad mojo.

And I’ve seen it debated back and forth whether Rare’s DKC games have poor collision detection… Let me make this clear, if you want a shining example of this, play the boss level “Squirt’s Showdown.” You’re transformed into the elephant, and you have to navigate on top of six rounded floating platforms as water tries to push you off. For the record, I died more because I landed on the rounded part of the platforms than Squirt actually pushing me off. It’s that bad. And this is the third game! This kind of crap should have been sorted out by this time. No excuses.

Speaking of the elephant, what a dumb idea for an animal friend. There’s a level where you can optionally transform into it a little after the halfway mark, and it’s actually much easier to beat the level by not transforming. Not only that, when you get to Squirt’s Showdown, you’re expected to know how to suck water up from the waterfall to squirt into its eyes. When does the game tell you how to do this? Never. You’re actually supposed to hold A and the shoulder button I think, or something ridiculous like that.

On the topic of bosses, they are probably this game’s second most egregious sin in light of DKC2 (first being the music.) They are dumb, trash, frustrating to play, poorly explained, and plain not fun. You have Squirt (a pair of eyes behind a waterfall, or something), a giant barrel with arms, the abominable snowman (not even kidding), a mutant clam, and some overly-designed generic robot called KAOS (which at the end I found out was supposed to be the big bad, I guess.) They are just bad.

The specific level gimmicks are almost as bad, varying from “not fun” to “rage-inducing” all throughout the course of the game. And example? One level, you’re climbing up a rope as the end burns. Sounds fun right? Well how about instead of you having to navigate around the objects that you’re climbing past, we have these enemies that float down to you, without any indication where or when they’ll be coming. They might have just called the level “Trial and Error with a Rope.”

The level gimmicks aren’t designed to test your skill, they’re designed to keep you playing the level over and over again for as long a possible. In one level, a gas reverses the direction on the d-pad. Since it’s only used in one level, whatever skill you build up learning this entirely new control scheme is quickly abandoned.

Don’t get me started on Kiddy Kong. Seriously, don’t.

And finally, the music. You know what? It’s already been said. It’s OK, which makes it about 10 billion times worse than DKC2′s by default. Wise is sorely missed. It’s like if you loved SMG’s soundtrack, then found out there wasn’t any music in SMG2 at all. That’s how much of a step down it is.

All right, I think that’s everything. Oh actually, one more thing: the controls in the snowman boss are worse than a taser to the crotch. You have to alternate between throwing far and throwing close, but you also have to move side to side to dodge snowballs, and 80% of the time you’re not on the setting you need because of it. There are exactly four main face buttons on the SNES controller, and Rare decided that instead of putting the throwing controls on two of the three remaining unused buttons, it would put them on the d-pad, where they’re easily confused. Argh! Once again, I died more because of control stupidity than because the boss was actually hard.

In short: it’s a shame Rare couldn’t build on the good parts of DKC2, which I now see as probably a fluke of theirs. Thankfully, Retro is here to clean up the mess they made with this dog doo-doo.