This game by itself takes the bongos from a gimmick peripheral to something worth trying, which is very impressive. I remember trying it for about 5 minutes at a friend's house as a kid, thought it was hard to control, and passed it off as a gimmick. I bought some DK Bongos recently to play this, mostly thinking it would just be a funny bit and I could stream it for friends, but I was surprised to find that this is actually a really fun game.

It genuinely makes good use of the peripheral, and the controls are fine once you get used to them, maybe with the exception of claps being a little inconsistent (tapping the side of the bongos instead helped a lot). The levels mostly flow well, though the bird sections and swimming sections feel a bit worse. There's a good variety of environments, and the boss fights are shockingly fun and creative, for a while at least. My biggest complaint with the game is that they introduce all of these awesome and varied bosses early on, and then end up reusing variants of them too much throughout the game. Still really cool though and more than I expected out of this.

The scoring requirements are a little strict, though I do like that they show you videos of how to better keep up your combo after completing a level. I just got the normal ending for this playthrough but could definitely see myself going back for the post-game content in the future, as sadly there's not much else to play on the bongos. Very happy I got to try this, I'm a big fan of the Donkey Kong series and didn't even know what I was missing out on with this one.