When Nintendo and Retro Studios announced Donkey Kong Country Returns at E3 2010, the reaction was a mixture of ecstatic joy and skeptical anxiety. Could anyone—even the studio behind Metroid Prime —capture the magic of the original SNES trilogy crafted by Rareware?
Donkey Kong Country Returns is brutally hard. The "Modern" difficulty meme starts here. While you can buy items (Squawks the parrot to find hidden orbs, Crash Guards to survive a fatal fall), the base level design is unforgiving.
Donkey Kong Country Returns arrived on the Wii—a console famous for its casual, motion-controlled accessibility—as a piece of counter-programming. It refused to compromise. It demanded precision, punished impatience, and celebrated the pure, unadorned joy of mastering a difficult jump sequence. It is not a perfect game. The waggle-to-roll motion control (which can be mitigated with the Classic Controller Pro) is a needless layer of fatigue, and the boss fights, while creative, occasionally overstay their welcome with too many health phases.