Donkey Kong 64 Review

Pros:

-Donkey Kong 64 features one of the best soundtracks on the Nintendo 64. All of the level music in Donkey Kong 64 sounds perfect for the setting. The music for Jungle Japes sounds like jungle music, and it also sounds similar to the music heard in the first level of Donkey Kong Country, which adds a bit of familiarity to the game.

-Donkey Kong 64 looks absolutely wonderful for a Nintendo 64 game. The texture quality and model quality are both rather impressive for the time the game came out, and the system it came out on.

-Ground-based movement is fun. This might seem like a strange thing to praise a game for, but this is a huge component for what makes a game feel fun.

Cons:

-Donkey Kong 64 starts off extremely slow. I know why they have five tutorials, and they do their best to be fun, but the tutorial levels don’t teach you anything you won’t already learn through trial and error, which you’ll need to do lots of anyway because…

-The controls are a pain to remember. Almost every action requires you to press two buttons. Using your camera? Z button plus C  down. Want to use your instrument? Z plus C up. This isn’t the only issue involving the controls though.

-Different button combinations do different actions. If you’re playing as Tiny Kong or Donkey Kong, holding Z and pressing B will will slide your forward, which give you a little bit of a speed boost, or at least makes movement more fun.

If you’re playing as Diddy Kong or Chunky Kong, you’ll perform a different action, which isn’t even remotely helpful in getting you where you want to go.

-There’s too much to do in this game. There are five characters, and each of them have collectibles in each and every level. This increases the length of the game significantly, but it’s not done well enough for it to be fun. And nostalgia will only do so much to make you have a good time with this.

-Without going to spoiler territory, the final boss is glitchy.

Overall Opinion:

Donkey Kong 64 is an enjoyable game. The music and level design makes playing the game fun. This game is NOT for everyone though. If you want to play a collectathon, this is a good game to go for.