Donkey Kong Bananza is arguably Nintendo’s most important game of 2025. 

It’s being crafted by the team that made 2017’s sensational Super Mario Odyssey. 

That pedigree comes with great expectations. DK hasn’t been the star of a 3D platformer for more than 25 years and there’s pressure to maintain momentum after Mario Kart World helped make the Nintendo Switch 2 the fastest selling game console of all time. 

Last week, Nintendo invited me to play Donkey Kong Bananza for about four hours.

SO EASY EVEN A MONKEY CAN DO IT

A few things didn’t click when I first played Donkey Kong Bananza. 

The camera can get funky when you’ve burrowed a narrow tunnel and controlling DK isn’t as intuitive as running and jumping with Mario. 

The B, Y and X buttons are tied to punching down, forward and up respectively; relegating DK’s jump to the A button, which is an odd placement for a Nintendo platformer. After more time with the game I got used to it but every now and then I’d hit the wrong button and punch downward to my death. 

Donkey Kong has a lot more moves than Mario to learn too.

Besides punching, he can rip off chunks of enemies and the environment (ZR), throw those chunks (ZR), aim to throw (by holding ZR), slap his hands together to collect nearby items (R), roll (ZL) and start ‘turf surfing’ by pressing ZL while holding a piece of terrain. 

That’s a lot to wrap your head around. The game does a very good job at teaching you everything but if I struggle with it at times, newer players may find the barrier to entry a little higher than they might expect.       

My preview covered four of the game’s levels, including: the tutorial area is a monkey mining colony; the game’s first level and two levels from later in the game which bring water and poison into the mix. 

Each is wonderfully different from the last and, in classic Nintendo style, each has a gimmick which adds to the variety.  

In the poison swamp level, which is very reminiscent of Super Mario Odyssey’s Lost Kingdom, there are seeds you can pick up and throw at walls to create an instant bridge between you and the spot you just hit.

There are also enemies that chomp at you, whose bodies you can use like a bridge if you dodge at the right time. 

Like Odyssey, levels have a general goal but you’re encouraged to explore. It’s less about making it to the end and more about how much you can discover along the way.

And in keeping with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, puzzles often have more than one solution thanks to how the world’s environment interacts. 

Metal is stronger than stone, stone is stronger than dirt, and dirt is stronger than sand. Sand is so soft that you can stack it on top of itself to create makeshift towers or bridges.

There are also purple-veined explosive materials that can tear everything to shreds.

It’s a level of complexity that is woven into everything from exploration to boss encounters. 

The levels themselves are wonderfully designed with puzzles and challenge areas scattered throughout.

Challenges are often ‘locked’ behind Void Co tape (the game’s villains) which can be removed by Odd-Rock or Pauline’s singing (holding down L).

The ones I played ranged from defeating a number of enemies within a time limit to entire side-scrolling levels which had me blasting through barrels to find the game’s main collectable; banana gems called Banandium.    

WOULD YOU LIKE TIES WITH THAT 

Collectibles are only as fun as what they unlock and, even after a short time with the game, I can tell that DK Bananza’s ‘economy’ is one of Nintendo’s best. 

Collecting five Banandium gems unlocks a skill point, which you can use to unlock and power up new abilities.

Banandium chips (aka Super Mario Odyssey’s purple coins) can be used to buy new outfits for Pauline and DK, and even change the colour of DK’s fur.

Unlike Super Mario Odyssey, these outfits actually carry special buffs like swimming faster or taking less damage from poison. 
And finally, there are a heap of musical tracks to collect and listen to (Mario Kart World take note!).

That music is both critical to the story of Donkey Kong Bananza and DK’s new Bananza power-ups. 

Nintendo has already showed off three Bananza power-ups: Kong, Zebra and Ostrich. 

I only got to try the Kong and Ostrich Bananzas in my preview and I’m happy to report they are as fun (and ridiculous) as they sound.

The Kong Bananza transforms DK into something more like a silverback gorilla and gives him the strength to punch through metal. The Ostrich Bananza transforms DK into (you guessed it) an ostrich with the ability to fly and drop egg bombs, which is another control scheme you’ll have to wrap your head around. 

You’ll need to collect gold (like Mario’s coins) to activate these temporary transformations. I was able to ‘cheese’ my way through a few puzzles by exploiting the power-ups, which are incredibly overpowered, but nowhere near as overpowered as adding a second player. 

Handing a controller to a friend to control Pauline is effectively a cheat code. The game effectively becomes a third-person shooter with unlimited ammo. 

I let my lovely Nintendo rep take over as Donkey Kong so I could blast our way through a few bosses as Pauline and it rendered them useless. 

This isn’t the way I’d want to play but it’d probably be a blast for two young siblings. Unlike Super Mario Odyssey and the Galaxy games which gave the secondary players almost zero influence to maintain the integrity of the challenge, DK Bananza just rips the band-aid off and asks what is going to be the most fun? 

The mouse controls work really well but I found it easier to use the gyro controls instead.

We still know little to nothing about DK Banaza’s story. I don’t play Mario games for their plot, but Nintendo is trying something new here and fans are desperate to know how (or if) a teenage Pauline on a quest to the centre of the earth becomes mayor of New Donk City.

I have no doubt that Donkey Kong Bananza is a fun game. I’m less sure about its performance. 

During my demo I repeatedly noticed stutters in its frame rate. To my eyes, these slowdowns were more dramatic and far more noticeable than the performance problems The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past suffered on the original Nintendo Switch.

Donkey Kong Bananza also doesn’t appear to be pushing anywhere close to 4K either. Textures on destructible environments can appear muddy and furry characters (including DK himself) don’t look as sharp as they should, which could be the result of AI upscaling.

I wasn’t counting pixels and it might have been the TV I was playing on or how close I was sitting to it, but the game wasn’t reaching the same heights as Mario Kart World or the Switch 2 Edition of Breath of the Wild, which I’ve been spending plenty of time enjoying. 

The demo I played wasn’t the game’s final build. Here’s hoping it looks a little sharper when Donkey Kong Banaza swings onto the Nintendo Switch 2 on July 17.