Just finished Donkey Kong Country for the… 4th time? Maybe 5th? It’s one of the best platformers on Super Nintendo, but maybe not one of the best games. On paper, it does almost everything right. Tight controls, great graphics and soundtrack, fun level design, and a gradual difficulty curve that makes the game fun for kids and for experienced platformer players.
On the other hand, some of that difficulty is cheap, and the secrets are arbitrarily hidden. You’ll be throwing barrels at every wall and jumping into every pit on the off chance there’s a secret hidden there. Some pits are marked, such as with a single banana you can barely see at the bottom of the screen, but most aren’t.
I rolled credits without finding every secret, and I don’t regret it. I don’t find the secrets in this game fun to hunt for. That’s in sharp contrast to DKC 2 and 3, which do a great job of hiding secrets without making them feel arbitrary.
All that said, if you’re looking for a platformer and don’t care about doing anything more than finishing the game, this one still holds up well.
