Nintendo gave Donkey Kong a destructible 3D world and built one of the best platformers the studio has made since Odyssey.
My nephew asked me to buy this and then sat and watched while I played it for four hours without once asking for a turn, which I'm choosing to take as a review in its own right. Donkey Kong hasn't had a game built entirely around him this good since the Rare days, and Bananza gets there on a single idea: you can punch and tear and smash through nearly every surface you see. Terrain stops being scenery and starts being material, cliffsides crumble into climbable rubble, walls become tunnels the moment you decide they should, and every chunk of the map sits there waiting to be pulled apart.
The habit it built in me is the best praise I can give it. Somewhere around the third world I stopped believing in walls, so a locked door turned into a question about the floor underneath it, and a gap too wide to cross turned into a slab that needed tearing off something else first. I found a buried challenge room in the second world by punching through what I'd have sworn blind was set dressing, and from that point on I interrogated every suspicious surface in the game with my fists. Twenty-five hours later the campaign ended, and the week after that I caught myself in a completely different game 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 whole thing is quietly built around. Layers stack on top of each other, so punching through a level's floor drops you into an entirely different biome rather than into a void, which turns down into a direction of travel in a way almost no 3D platformer has bothered to try.
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 on. My one heresy about this game is that 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 shovels 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, throwing the environment at things, and they stay fun because the terrain is different in nearly every fight. Golden bananas and fossils are scattered everywhere without ever gating the story behind a quota, and my fossil screen looks like a museum entirely because I wanted it to. The camera does lose its mind occasionally, and it picks its moments. Three layers deep in a tunnel of your own making it sometimes can't decide which way is up, and reviews waving that off as minor are being generous, because I counted a dozen disorienting ten-second stretches in a game that's otherwise this polished, which is definately more than nothing.
A second player can control Pauline in co-op, tossing items and solving puzzles, which is clearly a side mode and a good one for a kid on the couch. I never worked out whether the destruction is fully simulated or whether the game is quietly deciding in advance which surfaces will give way, because it's convincing enough that I stopped being able to tell, and Nintendo doesn't talk about that sort of thing. Odyssey let you possess anything you saw, Bananza lets you destroy almost anything you see, and I've started a second run purely to dig down through every floor I skipped the first time.