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 makes the wait feel worth it by handing him a power nobody's given a Nintendo character before: you can punch, tear, and smash through nearly every surface you see. Terrain isn't scenery here, it's material. Cliffsides crumble into climbable rubble, walls become tunnels the moment you decide they should, and entire chunks of the map are just sitting there waiting for you to rip them apart looking for bananas, gold, or a shortcut nobody else found.
Pauline, the game's version of a hint-giving sidekick, has an actual mechanical role this time, her singing unlocks Donkey Kong's various transformation forms mid-level, letting him turn into a zebra for speed, a ball for tight spaces, or later forms that change how you interact with a layer entirely. It's a smarter integration of a companion character than most platformers manage, and the voice work sells a genuinely likable dynamic between the two of them.
“Odyssey let you possess anything you saw. Bananza lets you destroy almost anything you see instead.”
The verticality is the thing that surprised me most. Layers are stacked on top of each other, and Bananza actively encourages digging straight down through a level's floor to find an entirely different biome underneath rather than treating levels as flat spaces you traverse left to right. I found a hidden underground area in the second world purely by punching through what looked like decorative rock, and that kind of discovery kept happening for the entire twenty-five hour main campaign.
Combat leans on the same destruction mechanic as traversal, DK can pick up and throw chunks of terrain at enemies, and boss fights are built around using the environment as a weapon rather than a straightforward moveset. It's simple to learn and stays fun because the terrain is different in almost every fight, which keeps the pattern from going stale the way boss rushes in other platformers sometimes do.
Bananza is generous with collectibles without making them feel mandatory. Golden bananas and fossils are scattered everywhere, and the game trusts you to dig, smash, and explore for them at your own pace rather than gating story progress behind a strict collection quota. Completionists have plenty to chase, but the main path stays clear for anyone who just wants to see where the story goes.
The one place the destruction mechanic runs into trouble is the camera, which occasionally struggles to keep up once you've torn a hole through three layers of terrain and aren't sure which direction is up anymore. It's a minor complaint against how much freedom the terrain system otherwise grants, and it happened rarely enough in my playthrough that it never cost me a life, just a few seconds of reorientation.
Multiplayer support lets a second player control Pauline directly, tossing items and helping solve puzzles, and while it's clearly built as a secondary mode rather than the main event, it's a nice option for playing with a kid or a partner who isn't looking to do the platforming themselves.
Switch 2 needed a system-seller that wasn't just a kart racer, and Bananza delivers one by handing Nintendo's platforming formula something genuinely new to build around. Odyssey let you possess anything you saw. Bananza lets you destroy almost anything you see, and that's turned out to be just as good an idea.