Nintendo gave Donkey Kong a destructible 3D world and built one of the best platformers the studio has made since Odyssey.
Donkey Kong hasn't had a game built entirely around him this good since the Rare days, and Bananza gets there on one idea: you can punch, tear, and smash through nearly every surface you see. Terrain isn't scenery, it's material. Cliffsides crumble into climbable rubble, walls become tunnels the moment you decide they should, and every chunk of the map is sitting there waiting to be ripped apart.
The habit it built in me is the best praise I can give it. Around the third world I stopped believing in walls. Locked door? There's floor under it. Gap too wide? Tear off a slab and throw a bridge. I found a buried challenge room in the second world by punching through what I'd have sworn was set dressing, and from then on I interrogated every suspicious surface in the game with my fists. Twenty-five hours later the campaign ended and I caught myself, in a different game that same week, walking up to a wall and feeling vaguely insulted that it wouldn't break.
“Odyssey let you possess anything you saw. Bananza lets you destroy almost anything you see instead.”
Digging straight down is the move the game is quietly built around. Layers stack on top of each other, and punching through a level's floor drops you into an entirely different biome rather than a void, which turns 'down' into a direction of travel the way almost no 3D platformer has tried.
Pauline rides along as the companion, and her singing unlocks DK's transformation forms mid-level, a zebra for speed, a ball for tight spaces, bigger things later. Here's my one heresy: I'd give back every transformation to protect the digging. The forms are fine, the zebra sections are gorgeous, and every time a level pushed me into one I was mildly impatient to get back to being a gorilla with a shovel for hands. The voice work between DK and Pauline, on the other hand, I wouldn't cut a second of.
Combat and bosses run on the same destruction system, throw the environment at things, and stay fun because the terrain is different in nearly every fight. Golden bananas and fossils are everywhere without ever gating the story behind a quota. My fossil screen looks like a museum and nobody made me do that.
The camera does lose its mind occasionally. Three layers deep in a tunnel of your own making, it sometimes can't decide which way is up, and reviews that wave this off as minor are being a little generous. It never cost me a life. It cost me maybe a dozen disoriented ten-second stretches, and in a game this polished they stand out.
A second player can control Pauline in co-op, tossing items and solving puzzles, clearly a side mode and a good one for a kid on the couch.
Odyssey let you possess anything you saw. Bananza lets you destroy almost anything you see, and it turns out that's just as good an idea. The Switch 2 has its system-seller that isn't a kart racer.