Donkey Kong Bananza is Blast, Even If It Does Not Know "What Kind of Game It Wants To Be", Says Polygon

Donkey Kong Bananza is a giant underground playground full of things to smash, oddball characters to meet, and worlds that get weirder the deeper you go. The platforming isn’t sharp, the puzzles rarely hit their potential, and the whole game sometimes feels like it’s trying to be five different things at once. But the moment-to-moment fun of exploring and breaking stuff makes it hard to put down.

Polygon’s review summed it up perfectly: the game doesn’t really know what it wants to be, but it’s still a blast. And that’s the best way to describe Bananza — a game where the individual pieces might not fit together perfectly, but the whole thing still works because of how good those pieces feel to play with.

From the very first moments, the destruction grabs you. The tutorial isn’t just teaching you controls — it’s a playground. You can spend ages just smashing rocks, walls, and random bits of scenery. The impact is massive, exaggerated in a way that never stops being satisfying. Dirt doesn’t sprinkle away; it bursts in chunks. Glass doesn’t tinkle; it explodes. Enemies don’t politely keel over; they hang for a split second in cartoonish suspension before flying off into the abyss. Nintendo clearly spent a lot of time making sure hitting something felt good.

The story kicks off when DK tumbles into a massive hole and meets Pauline — first appearing as a talking rock — who’s on a mission to reach the planet’s core to make a wish. They travel together through increasingly bizarre underground layers. At first, you’d think “underground” means caves and stone corridors. Not here. Bananza’s underground is practically a multiverse of odd civilizations.

One layer might be a frozen city run by zebras who produce ice cream. Another could be a sprawling hotel managed by ostriches in suits. You’ll stumble into a disco party world glowing with neon or a rhino racing course built just because Diddy and Dixie Kong felt like it. The game’s answer to “why is this here?” is almost always “why not?” The vibe is somewhere between Journey to the Center of the Earth and Alice in Wonderland, except replace scientists and tea parties with monkeys, ostriches, and wise snakes inventing strange gadgets.

There’s even lore. Each layer hides journal-style logs about the Fractones — sentient stones making their own journey to the planet’s center. These excerpts read like something straight out of Jules Verne, grounding the nonsense in a consistent internal logic.

Of course, there’s also a villain. Void Kong isn’t a mystery — he’s as subtle as a wrecking ball. His deal is simple: dig deeper, steal resources, and crush anything in his way. He’s after Banandium Gems, the underground’s main energy source. Communities get destroyed, workers are used up and tossed aside, and when there’s no one left to hire, he brainwashes creatures to keep his machine going. It’s hard not to see the real-world parallels.

Underneath all this narrative color, the actual gameplay is built around exploration. The team behind Super Mario Odyssey designed the levels, but they’re not the neat obstacle courses you might expect. Instead, they’re closer to Breath of the Wild — open-ended environments with a clear main route but endless side paths and distractions. You’re constantly spotting something interesting just out of reach. Maybe it’s a shiny collectible in a cave, a strange landmark on a distant cliff, or a suspiciously breakable wall.

This approach works. The curiosity loop is addictive: you see something, you go there, you find another thing on the way, and suddenly you’ve been wandering for an hour. I usually skip side collectibles in games, but in Bananza I went out of my way to grab them all. The game rewards exploration with Banandium Gems, fossils, gold, and sometimes just the joy of discovering a weird little scene.

But here’s where the cracks show. The platforming itself is surprisingly light. DK’s climbing — which you’d expect to be one of his strengths — is awkward. Corners can throw him off walls for no reason, and most of your movement is on solid or breakable ground. The few pure platforming sections rely on running fast rather than precise jumps. For a supposed platformer, it often feels like an exploration game wearing a platformer’s skin.

The animal transformations add variety — turning DK into an elephant to clear lava, an ostrich to glide, and so on — but the game rarely forces you to use them in creative ways. Systems like turf surfing (riding chunks of terrain like a board) or stacking pieces of ground are introduced, but you can go most of the game barely using them. It’s only in the final stretch that you get puzzles designed around these powers, and by then it’s too late for them to become a core part of the experience.

Puzzles in general are hit or miss. A few encourage creative problem-solving, like luring a shark close enough to generate lift ore for reaching a high island. But many fall into the single-solution trap, making them feel like chores instead of experiments. “Use this ability in this exact way” pops up too often, breaking the flow.

Despite this, Bananza never stays dull for long. The pace is brisk, even if you’re hunting every collectible. A boring section is usually followed within minutes by something ridiculous — a hidden cavern full of gold, a boss fight that lets you punch an enemy into orbit, or just a fun side encounter. Rewards come fast, and even if they’re easy to grab, they still feel like little victories because they’re tied to your curiosity.

And then there’s the charm — Bananza is soaked in it. Pauline’s quiet musings before sleep give her character depth beyond “sidekick.” DK’s gleeful laugh when he blasts through the air is impossible to ignore. The internet-ready “Oh, Banana” sound clip is sprinkled around like an inside joke. Every layer has visual surprises, from the glowing mushroom groves to the industrial drill pits carved out by Void Kong’s machines.

The thing is, all that charm covers a lot of flaws. If you stripped away the humor, the spectacle, and the absurd worlds, you’d see a game with underused mechanics, a lopsided focus on one action (punching), and platforming that’s almost an afterthought. But those flaws rarely ruin the fun, because Bananza’s core loop — see something interesting, go punch your way to it, get rewarded — is so well executed.

It’s easy to imagine a “perfect” version of this game. One where the animal powers are woven into every level, puzzles have multiple solutions, and collectibles sometimes require real skill to grab. But that’s not the game Nintendo made this time. Instead, they built a cheerful, chaotic playground with bursts of brilliance, moments of clunkiness, and a steady undercurrent of “just one more thing before I stop playing.”

By the end, I wasn’t thinking about the puzzles I didn’t like or the powers I barely used. I was thinking about that last layer’s glowing crystal caverns, the ridiculous rhino race, the way my final punch sent Void Kong tumbling into darkness, and how even after the credits rolled, I wanted to dive back in and explore the places I’d missed.

Donkey Kong Bananza is flawed, absolutely. But it’s also proof that a game doesn’t have to be perfectly balanced to be worth your time. Sometimes, the sheer joy of playing is enough. And here, that joy comes from the simplest thing — being a giant gorilla who can break almost anything, and having an underground world bizarre enough to make you want to.