DK: Jungle Climber (DS)
Nintendo’s Donkey Kong franchise was going through a bit of an identity crisis when Rare stopped making the Donkey Kong platforming games due to their buyout by Microsoft, and until Retro Studios would return it to those roots, the necktie-wearing gorilla ended up in some very strange territory. It was decided that Donkey Kong’s big thing on consoles would be bongo-related games, but over on handheld systems, his new angle was an even stranger shift, DK now swinging around from floating pegs in the air to do his platforming. DK: King of Swing introduced the concept, but it was DK: Jungle Climber that started to hone things into a more cohesive and better controlled experience. There is one question hanging over the entire affair though… is the peg swinging gameplay something that can be honed into excellent gameplay?
Climbing pegs is at least controlled quite simply. Donkey Kong’s hands are controlled by pressing the DS’s shoulder buttons, the L button corresponding to the left and the R button to the right. To clasp a hand shut, you hold the button down, and through repeatedly doing this, you’ll be able to scale the large peg boards that make up the levels of DK: Jungle Climber. If you hold on with one hand, DK will just pivot around that hand until you either release or snag something else, meaning that spinning DK around will be a frequent factor in your movement and lead to some of the game’s awkwardness. Some peg boards are made for quick and fluid climbing, but as the game continues, the things you snag onto get smaller and smaller, DK needing to launch himself around constantly to get from one floating board to the next. You can do an attack to launch yourself forward and can jump up from the ground to gain height, but there’s plenty of movement dependent on releasing your hold when Donkey Kong has rotated to the proper position to transition his momentum to reaching a new perch. The player can guide DK’s aerial movement a bit when he’s launching upward or falling to course correct for slightly awkward launches, but this is the full extent of your movement capabilities save for a special ability you build up by collecting gems. With a full charge, DK can fly around a screen completely invincible, this being good for overcoming tough obstacles or getting to hidden secrets without much strife. It’s certainly helpful as a desperate save as well, since death in DK: Jungle Climber will reset some of your progress, and in the later levels that become complex precision tests, it can’t be heartbreaking to be reset to the start of a single screen, let alone a whole level for losing all your lives.
Swinging from peg to peg is the core challenge of DK: Jungle Climber, so certainly some of the peculiarities with control are part of the game’s intentional difficulty, but it’s not a control style that seems to encourage quick action or precise movements. Much of the early game has ground below Donkey Kong as you’re learning this unusual control style, and it stands to reason they’d remove this safety net in the later stages, but the bigger issue is not with falling so much as it is the pace of the game increasing. Despite needing to launch DK properly to get him to jump sometimes from single peg to single peg, later stages begin introducing enemies who have greater freedom of movement, long range attacks, or they clog the screen with foes or hazards that are hard to squeak by. Your attack can kill enemies if aimed properly, or it can just barely miss and get you in trouble. Needing to move in a hurry in a way limited both by your own controls and the position of the pegs can make some battles bigger headaches than expected, especially with some boss battles. Committing to a jump that turns out to be dangerous because of something you couldn’t have seen in advance tends to come up in the harder fights, even with two screens to view the action on.
Really, a lot more telegraphing or advance warning would alleviate the moments where trouble tends to blindside Donkey Kong well after he’s committed to a jump he can’t adjust enough to find safety, and the health system isn’t a good fit for the current level of peril. One hit and Donkey Kong will lose a life and be set back, but if he has Diddy Kong with him, Diddy acts an extra hit. The small monkey is an incredibly useful assistant though, because when DK has him on his back, Diddy can be launch for a long range attack and pick up certain special items in levels like feathers that let DK fly around, hammers to smash rocks and baddies with ease, and flamethrowers to melt away snow. Losing Diddy definitely hurts, so while that encourages you to be careful, it’s also prone to the problem of sudden surprise damage all the same.
Despite the tone so far, DK: Jungle Climber’s normal play isn’t overly frustrating. It’s certainly slow, but save jumps in difficulty like boss fights and later levels, the game does a decent job of making swinging about an engaging challenge. The set up for the game involves Donkey Kong and his family and friends vacationing on an island only to notice an enormous banana appear on the island’s mountaintop. As a group of apes, they are immediately compelled to go and investigate in hopes of finding a massive meal, but the banana is actually the spaceship of an alien named Xananab from Planet Plantaen. Speaking with a delightfully silly speech impediment of extending words a la The Name Game song with “banana fanna fo fanna” and its variations, it turns out the alien had his Crystal Bananas stolen by DK’s long time nemesis King K. Rool, the fat crocodile aiming to use them to conquer the galaxy. The Crystal Bananas have strange properties that can enhance K. Rool’s Kremling minions, and while DK will be swinging across islands with various different themes to try and remove them from the hands of such villains, he’ll need to jump into strange dimensions to follow their trail on occasion. Mirror worlds, toy worlds, and more change up the play with strange new peg replacements to swing from and unusual gimmicks like needing to make sure DK and his reflection line up while climbing. Its these more creative platforming challenges that keep DK: Jungle Climber from slipping into being a lost cause.
Had DK: Jungle Climber stuck to keeping the movement the focus of the challenge, it could have come out better, but the danger added doesn’t really improve things. The pressure of lost progress is a better deterrent to sloppiness than the threat of an instant death that might not be on-screen until it’s too late. There is a lot of optional content for the player to indulge with too that does tend to challenge the better side of the game. Mini-games are available in a few variations that challenge the player with very simple control challenges like jumping over logs or grabbing bananas as they fall in front of DK’s hands, and many levels contain hidden items to be found through smart movement to unlock secret stages and “cheats” which are usually just ways to ease the difficulty up a bit like having more lives after a game over or Diddy’s weapons being more effective. With special objects in levels like barrel cannons to blast you about and flowers that can launch you like catapults, even normal levels can shift thing around enough that until you hit the moments where the peg swinging’s capabilities are stretched a bit too far, you’ll find something that could have made for quite the enjoyable adventure.
THE VERDICT: DK: Jungle Climber had the base variety to its design and tons of goodies to be a fun Donkey Kong adventure despite the odd peg swinging mechanic, but it pushed itself too far in trying to up the challenge, its efforts elsewhere tainted by the need for precision not agreeing with the controls. The peg swinging is what makes platforming in the game both an enjoyable challenge and one not up to snuff with its design, the game losing some of its luster in later levels where danger can come quicker than the player can properly respond. For most of the journey, the movement limitations lead to interesting play, but when the levels stop acting like you’re hindered by them, DK: Jungle Climber finds it can’t quite stick the landing.
And so, I give DK: Jungle Climber for the Nintendo DS…
An OKAY rating. Since most of the issues with the game asking too much of its movement mechanics crop up near the end or during boss battles, most of DK: Jungle Climber can squeak by without being viewed as something outright bad. The control makes sense and in a slow environment it can handle what’s asked of it, and if the game had kept to that zone and continued to make interesting challenges out of it like it did in the other dimensions, it wouldn’t have to have reflex focused battles to try and keep the action going. In fact, other parts of the game can do the time sensitive swinging better, with crumbling pegs you need to leap off before they break or other time-sensitive challenges that aren’t so tight that you’ll die because of something you did before the threat appeared.
DK: Jungle Climber is almost like a puzzle platformer where the puzzle is just figuring out how to move properly, and that’s not a bad angle for a game to go with. That is probably why DK: Jungle Climber ends up feeling like it overextended itself trying to rope in things more fit for a game that does value combat and speed, but when you’re just trying to climb around the jungle as Donkey Kong, it does feel like it’s got the hang of its unique peg swinging movement. It’s a shame it lost it’s footing before it could conclude, a reasonably good batch of levels that engaged that mechanic well hurt by the later ones.