Review: ‘Donkey Kong Bananza' trades manic platforming for unhurried exploring

5 days ago

An undated screenshot shows a scene from "Donkey Kong Bananza," the new game starring Nintendo's well-known simian mascot and the company's second major release for its Switch 2 console. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Handout - Nintendo of America (Mandatory Credit)
TORONTO — Even a rampaging ape needs to take time to stop and smell the roses.
Or so it would seem in 'Donkey Kong Bananza,' the new game released Thursday starring Nintendo's well-known simian mascot and the company's second major release for its Switch 2 console.
The first original 'Donkey Kong' game in 11 years forgoes the difficult side-scrolling platform levels and manic boss battles of previous titles for a 3D world that players can explore at their own pace. It plays more like a sequel to 'Super Mario Odyssey,' a 2017 3D game starring another major Nintendo character, albeit with a lot more smashing.
'Donkey Kong Bananza' starts off with the titular hero searching for banana-shaped gems in a mine. He runs afoul of a villainous band of apes who steal the gems and make their way to the planet's core.
Donkey Kong gives chase and along the way befriends a young girl named Pauline, who can empower the ape through her singing. Pauline learns different 'Bananza' songs throughout the game and can use them to turn DK into a stronger gorilla, a sure-footed zebra or a flying ostrich, among others.
Things pick up once Donkey Kong moves on from the introductory level and the game's world opens up. Despite heading deeper into the planet's depths Donkey Kong and Pauline will encounter jungles, tropical beaches, deserts and more in the various substrata.
All levels can also be smashed to pieces. Donkey Kong can use his prodigious strength to punch his way through almost any terrain to avoid hazards, find short cuts or hunt for collectible items.
No matter how interesting the world looks on the surface, digging through rock is still digging through rock. Punching tunnels through the destructible environments to find collectibles and power-ups becomes repetitive after a time. The game's camera can also lose sight of Donkey Kong when he's underground, occasionally leading to misadventure as he emerges at the edge of a cliff or over a pit of lava.
Still, much of the indiscriminate digging can be avoided for those who are content to finish the game without seeking every collectible or secret. And the worlds in 'Donkey Kong Bananza' still offer plenty to discover for those less keen on spelunking.
The aforementioned banana-shaped diamonds can be recovered in a number of ways, from defeating a boss enemy to completing challenges scattered across the game to finding them in the wild. Donkey Kong can use these bananas to buy new powers or improve existing ones, adding a role-playing game element to his journey.
DK can also uncover fossils that can be used to buy new outfits for Pauline or himself, and hideouts can be found peppered throughout the game's various layers. Here DK and Pauline can rest to recover health, change outfits and listen to any records collected during the adventure. Find enough hideouts on a particular level and Donkey Kong will gain extra health when he rests and unlock a concierge who will facilitate his shopping needs.
The ability to casually explore and the game's lower difficulty — enemies are mostly placed as mere hindrances rather than serious obstacles, and even most boss battles are not challenging — marks a sharp contrast to DK's adventures in the 'Donkey Kong Country' series.
The last game in that long-running franchise, 'Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze,' was a platformer with a hectic pace and tricky but rewarding battles. It was also well-liked by gamers, who might be in for a surprise if expecting more of the same in 'Donkey Kong Bananza.'
But the switch to a 3D sandbox gives players more agency over how they want to progress. And it unleashes Donkey Kong to smash up the place without many constraints. With his ability to punch through walls, surf on chunks of granite and throw boulders at enemies with ease, DK has arguably never been more fun to play.
After the Switch 2 launched last month with only 'Mario Kart World Tour' in its lineup, 'Donkey Kong Bananza' should give early adopters of the console more to sink their teeth into. Donkey Kong still smashes, but now he might take a minute to appreciate his surroundings before obliterating them.
'Donkey Kong Bananza: is rated E10+, meaning suitable for gamers aged 10 and up, and retails for $100.
A digital copy of the game was provided to The Canadian Press for the purposes of this review.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 17, 2025.
Curtis Withers, The Canadian Press

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How Eadweard Muybridge revolutionized photography and got away with murder

CBC

3 hours ago

How Eadweard Muybridge revolutionized photography and got away with murder

Eadweard Muybridge is best known for his iconic series of photos of a horse in motion that proved it fully left the ground while running. But Muybridge also took impressive landscapes of Alaska and Yosemite National Park, invented cutting-edge photography techniques used in Hollywood blockbusters, and quite literally got away with murder after finding out his wife was having an affair — all of which caught the attention of Canadian animator and graphic novelist Guy Delisle. "I knew Muybridge, but I didn't know all of this life. And I thought, wow, that's crazy. He had gone through so many things that I thought this could be a good subject for a book," said Delisle. Delisle's latest graphic novel, Muybridge, tells the story behind the man whose books, Animals in Motion and The Human Figure in Motion, are still used by animators as reference books today. Here's part of his conversation with Day 6 host Brent Bambury. Let's talk about the images in Animals in Motion, especially the most famous ones of the horses running. When you look at those images, what do you see? There's kind of a strange mix because they look very modern, but you can tell that they are from a very old time and it's back in the days where … they had no instant photo. And he still managed to achieve that for the first time with the horse, so that's why this sequence is very symbolic because that's the achievement of his lifetime. I think he spent seven years just achieving that. And after that, he applied the technique that he developed for the horse at full speed on everything that's moving, basically, animals and humans. But back in the 1800s, there was this unresolved question about whether all four of the horses' hooves leave the ground at the same time, or is one of them always touching the ground to support the animal.... Why was it so important to Edward Muybridge to be able to answer that question? It was not so much important to Muybridge, [but] actually to his sponsor, who was the richest guy in the United States at the time, Leland Stanford, the guy who actually opened up Stanford University later on. He was very rich and he [bred] horses and he was really enthusiastic about horses. He wanted to know exactly how the horse moved in order to breed them better. And it's a bit technical, it's hard to imagine, but it was a big subject at the time between horse people. And he asked Muybridge because he was a famous photographer.… He asked him to take a picture of a horse at full speed. So he had to go to a speed of 1/1,000th of a second to have something clear with not a blurry photo. So they tried and it took a long time, but Stanford is not the kind of guy who you can say no to. So Muybridge had to invent a few things to achieve that. It seems that you suggest that Muybridge was not necessarily interested in the question and the debate about the horse's hooves on the ground, but he was interested in whether the science could be developed, whether the science of photography could answer the question. For him, that was what was important. Is that true? Yeah, I guess he was caught in the question. I don't think he was such a big horse fan. But the question was very interesting because you can see that through all of his life, he has invented stuff. He invented a special lens for his camera to be able to have clouds on pictures, because back in the days when you would take long, like one minute, [to take a] picture, so the sky would be white. So he invented something so that he can add clouds afterwards. So he was the first one to have a very nice sky with clouds in his pictures. So I thought for him, it was a challenge. Like, OK, how can we do that? So he actually invented the shutter. It was like a guillotine system, which goes down very quickly. And he was able to go to one at 1/500th of a second with that. Then at one point, after a few tries he said, "We have to put like 12 cameras in a row. And while the horse is passing in front of these cameras, there's going to be a little wire going to trigger the camera and the horse is going to take the picture while he's running in front." The system worked … so you can see actually that the horse for a few steps is floating. It's not touching the ground. So Stanford had his answer and that was first time, actually, that people would see something that the camera could see, but not the eye could see. So it was quite a breakthrough. While he was away taking photographs, working on commissions, his wife had an affair. Muybridge finds out about this affair and he shoots and kills the man with whom she was having this affair. Muybridge goes to trial for murder and he gets off. Why? What happened? During the trial, he said, "Yeah, I killed that guy because he's probably the father of the kid that I thought was my kid." All the jury were actually men with children and it's in California in 1870, in a state where there were two men for one woman. So the jury decided that he did what he had to do, [so] he walked out of the court freely and under the applause of the people. Muybridge was a huge influence in early photography and then in motion pictures. But as someone now who knows his life very well, and as somebody whose own life is built around the creation of images, what is the thing that stands out the most for you about Edward Muybridge? For me, I still have that book that I've used when I'm an animator, and even though they're technical … they have a feeling of a Victorian era that whenever I look at them, I've always really enjoyed the artistic quality of it.