If you found yourself falling in love with the world of Donkey Kong Banaza like I did, you’re likely thrilled that there’s already a DLC pack that takes you back to the classic DK island and adds a new way to play through the old levels.
The first and most exciting element is the new game layer (level), DK Island. It’s styled after the classic Donkey Kong Country island with a tropical vibe. It’s not the largest level in the game but it’s pretty neat, and has a few cool easter eggs that I won’t spoil. That said, anyone who grew up in the GameCube era is going to grin ear to ear at one of them.
To get to the new island, you either need to beat the game and talk to one of the elders to start the post-game or find a green bird named Squawks on the Race layer. Since I’d already beaten the game, I was able to go to the warp gate, and a small cutscene played before taking me to the surface.
Once you get there, you run into some familiar faces and are tasked with a new gameplay style, Emerald Rush. In this mode, all the gold is replaced with emeralds, and you need to see how much you can get before the timer runs out. It sounds simplistic, but it’s actually extremely intense and requires a lot of mastery of the game’s movement mechanics. I played up until level three so far, and I failed the final challenge on that level quite a few times before.
The more you play, you start to unlock perks and other powers as you smash fossils or bananas. These help you move around faster or collect more emeralds, which becomes increasingly important the further you make it into the game. Some also give you emerald bonuses. It’s kind of like getting boons in Hades or other powers in your roguelike game of choice. It’s a lot of fun, and while I breezed through the first two levels, like I said, the tail end of level three is quite hard, and you need to make sure you’re maximizing every power-up.
As you play, you’ll unlock the Emerald Rush mode for the previous layers, but not every level has one. For instance, the small Divide layer won’t have an Emerald Rush mode. Beyond that, there are a few new outfits for Pauline to collect and two new ties for DK.
Others online have been bemoaning the price, and I can sort of see why, but I’ll offer another perspective. Before the DLC, during my time playing Bananza, I was repeatedly impressed with how full the game was. Even after beating the story, there are tons of challenge rooms I still need to complete and bananas to be found. Plus, I’ve only done a bit of the post-game, so there’s more story that I still need to play.
It’s safe to say that when I rolled credits on the main story, I was satisfied. The game wasn’t cheap, and I wasn’t happy to see game prices rise to $115, but at the end of the day I was delighted. So while I would have been blown away to see this packed into the main game, it kind of makes sense to be its own thing, and I think at $30, I’m not going to complain about it.
Overall, if you played Donkey Kong Bananza and loved it like I did, this is an easy recommendation from me. It’s also more fun to play with friends, too, since you can pass the controller after each short level and compete against each other. The DLC is available to download on the Nintendo eShop.
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