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by Rafiki 09/21/2025, 10:00pm PDT |
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Rafiki wrote:
my frontrunner for GOTY.
Now that I've had more time with it and my initial impressions have worn off, nah. Endlessly smashing: still fun. Controls: still effortlessly fluid. Game: still positive.
The goal is to kill the big bad and as near as I can tell, you can work your way straight through to the end unimpeded if you want. Sometimes literally by punching holes through the world instead of going the "correct" way. You're not gated by how many stars bananas you've collected (so far, I haven't reached the end) so you can run around and collect them at your leisure or just blast through the levels to the boss. Most of the bananas are just buried underground and it's a matter of smashing through to them. There's often tunnels or pathways with enemies and obstacles set up to provide some sort of challenge to reach them, or you can just bypass all of that by tunneling through the ground / walls. This makes the game feel unfocused. Like, it's cool you can essentially navigate the levels any way you want, but this also kind of negates the challenge. It's like downloading a Mario Maker level and then going into edit mode to delete the whole thing and then just crossing the finish line. Breath of the Wild (which I still love) had a similar (but more minor) problem where the freedom of climbing made the open world feel amazing, but sometimes I would stumble across little encampments from the "wrong" direction and decimate them, walk out the front gate and see there was a gauntlet set up for approaching it from the front, and then I'd think, huh, that looks like it would have been kind of fun to do it the right way. Like BotW, DK has "shrines" with various challenges for earning bananas that are generally more fun than just punching a hole through the world precisely because of the restrictions imposed on you.
tldr; still having fun, not a 10/10 or GOTY |
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