Donkey Kong Country (Wii U)

Time for some monkey buisness!

I was gonna play Donkey Kong Bananza during my final weekend of my vacation, but yet again the postal services have betrayed me. So it will probably come when I started work again. Thanks for that. So what can I do to occupy myself these last days? Well, I got the whole Country-series on Wii U so that could be something. I got the game on GBA, Wii Virtual Console, 3DS, Wii U and SNES Mini and technically I got the Donkey Kong Land as well, but this is the first time I actually finish it for the first time. Only around 50 % since I haven't gotten all secrets and so on and I won't get them since I really don't like the game.

Story is that King K. Rool and his kremlings have stolen Donkey Kong's banana hoard so DK and Diddy sets out to get them back. Kranky Kong, Funky Kong and Candy Kong sets out to help our primate friends as they traverse all over DK Island in search for the golden bananas. It's rather hard and maybe why I don't like it. To often there is a new gimmick for the stage and you basically have to memorize the stages in order to get past them. I remember reading a review of... maybe the GBA game for the Swedish magazine Super Play where the reviewer apologized for ever thinking this game was good so it might have colored my perception as well. 

I got past the game mostly by abusing the save state function on the Wii U and in total the gameplay ended on less than 2 hours, but I assume that it maybe would have been a couple hours added since I restarted all the time. To finish it legit? Who knows how many hours I had to spend on it. Now, if I was a kid and played it as intended on SNES I might have forced myself to learn the patterns and such and have a completely different appreciation of the game. 

But to be more positive, it looks good with the graphics and the music is really good, but it plays a bit bad in my opinion. And the game is a bit evil with enemy placement, for example there is a couple of stages where before clearing a jump from moving platforms there is a big muscle guy you only can defeat with Donkey Kong since Diddy is to small, if you hit them as Diddy, they push you back into the pit, game over. And the bosses takes a lot of beating and with only two hits it's a question of pattern recognition. So you see, I'm not that impressed by the game.