Missed playing this when I was growing up by virtue of being a Genesis kid, and it's pretty hard to believe that this is the first platformer starring Donkey Kong; Rare got a lot right straight out of the gate!
If I had to describe Donkey Kong Country in 3 words it would be "Rayman done right". Even though the games aren't related, this has a lot in common with Rayman: the well-done graphics and animation, the quasi-overworld screen that allows you to return to previously-cleared levels and search for secrets you missed, the hard levels combined with easy bosses, and the iterative level design that introduces harder and harder variants of simple gimmicks that are clever at best and trial-and-error at their worst.
DKC is a much smoother experience, though, because the difficulty level is nowhere near as obnoxious; with Rayman I literally had to remap the save/load state keys because I was using them nearly as much as the 'jump' button, but I managed to finish DKC on original hardware. It has its moments of bullshit, but it comes across more like good-natured trolling (like the physical comedy Donkey and Diddy Kong inflict on each other at the credits screen) than pure sadism. It helps that the cleverly-hidden secrets are entirely optional, adding some incentive to replay and explore the game more thoroughly but without gating the ending behind some arbitrary completion percentage.
If you're looking for a nice classic platformer and haven't given this a try, I'd say why not? It doesn't do anything exceptional with its level design or mechanics, but it's a joy-filled romp through and through, with the excellent animation and soundtrack the icing on the cake.
If I had to describe Donkey Kong Country in 3 words it would be "Rayman done right". Even though the games aren't related, this has a lot in common with Rayman: the well-done graphics and animation, the quasi-overworld screen that allows you to return to previously-cleared levels and search for secrets you missed, the hard levels combined with easy bosses, and the iterative level design that introduces harder and harder variants of simple gimmicks that are clever at best and trial-and-error at their worst.
DKC is a much smoother experience, though, because the difficulty level is nowhere near as obnoxious; with Rayman I literally had to remap the save/load state keys because I was using them nearly as much as the 'jump' button, but I managed to finish DKC on original hardware. It has its moments of bullshit, but it comes across more like good-natured trolling (like the physical comedy Donkey and Diddy Kong inflict on each other at the credits screen) than pure sadism. It helps that the cleverly-hidden secrets are entirely optional, adding some incentive to replay and explore the game more thoroughly but without gating the ending behind some arbitrary completion percentage.
If you're looking for a nice classic platformer and haven't given this a try, I'd say why not? It doesn't do anything exceptional with its level design or mechanics, but it's a joy-filled romp through and through, with the excellent animation and soundtrack the icing on the cake.