Donkey Kong’s newest game is a decade old.

I think I need to stop falling for Nintendo hype in a post-Switch world. It seems like every game that comes out on the console (this was on the Wii U, but nobody played it there) gets hyped to the point of over-inflation, always being hailed as the “best [X] ever”. Tropical Freeze is certainly no exception to this, reaching a sort of deified status as the apex of the modern 2D platformer; it isn’t even the best Donkey Kong game. It’s good, certainly. But it’s an experience carried immensely by its vibes, and they’re wrapped around a core that seems to get emptier and emptier the closer you try to examine it.

Grudgingly, I respect how heavy Donkey Kong is in this game. He is fucking slow. He’s a big, weighty gorilla, and his standard jump carries him about two feet horizontally. He will not be able to clear gaps that I could probably get across simply because of how bulky he is. You’re likely going to feel that Donkey Kong controls like shit at first while you grapple with the controls, but it won’t be much longer until you figure out the way that momentum works in this game: if Donkey Kong gets a running start and rolls into a jump, he can practically clear the entire horizontal space of the screen in a single leap. You’ll start overshooting jumps rather than coming up too short. The tools are there, they’re just a little tricky to get the hang of. What I really don’t like, however, is that the virtually worthless ground-slaps are bound to the same triggers as the roll; Donkey Kong can only get the roll from a running start, and he does the slaps while standing still. There will be many, many times that you’ll be standing on a teeny, tiny platform that requires you to roll jump to the next one, and the timing to get a running start is ridiculously tight. Most of the time you’ll risk either walking straight off the edge because you didn’t roll soon enough, or slapping the ground and then doing a slow jump down into the abyss because you pressed the roll button too early. Binding ground-slaps and roll to different buttons probably would have cut my deaths completely in half, and forcing them to be contextual on the same triggers made the actual act of platforming feel way clunkier than it needed to be.

The game is tricky, but very easily broken. I don’t know if the Tropical Freeze was balanced with the expectation you would have Dixie Kong or not, but she erases any degree of challenge from the game; playing without her feels like walking on a broken foot without crutches. Dixie Kong allows you to double-jump in the air, swim faster underwater, and she comes with a special ability that converts all enemies on screen into bonus health pickups that overheal you, allowing you to have a potential maximum of ten hits before death if you bring the right equipment compared to the usual two or four you get with anyone else. Compared to the other Kong partners, Dixie is the clear winner: Diddy’s glide doesn’t give any vertical height, which makes recovering from bad jumps nearly impossible, and Cranky needs a flat surface to do his Ducktales cane bounce off of in a game that’s 50% bottomless pits. Speaking of, you’re also allowed to bring up to three green balloons into a level at once, each of them allowing you to float all the way to the top of the screen whenever you fall into a pit. This effectively gives you three extra lives and three extra mid-level checkpoints. It makes things go from a bit too tough to way too easy. Sure, I could play without partners and without power-ups, but why would I? Not only are Dixie and the green balloons extraordinarily powerful, but they’re fun to use. Dixie has plenty of tools to expedite the platforming challenges, and the green balloons prevent the frustration of losing both your progress and your partner to a single bad jump. If you give me a choice between “optimal and fun but I feel like I’m cheating” and “sub-optimal and challenging and I’m going to tear what’s left of my fucking hair out”, I’m picking the former every time. I’d prefer a middle ground, but you’re not going to find that in Tropical Freeze.

David Wise is back to compose the soundtrack, and he does as good of a job as you ought to expect from the guy who made every song in Donkey Kong Country. While mostly solid, the songs do bleed into one another much more than they did in his earlier work on the Super Nintendo titles. It's ironic when you consider how few tracks the first SNES game actually had; differentiating music from between worlds here is easy enough, but you could shuffle the individual level themes around and not really notice much of a change. Also not helping matters is the copying of his own music from three decades ago; the generic “underwater” theme that gets used every time Donkey Kong leaps into the waves recycles Aquatic Ambience. Aquatic Ambience is an outstanding track. Aquatic Ambience becomes significantly less of an outstanding track when it interrupts the level music every single time Donkey Kong goes underwater. Even if it’s just for a few seconds, you’re gonna be listening to the opening notes of Aquatic Ambience for the entirety of those few seconds. It’s an odd choice. I was starting to get sick of it long before I had run out of bodies of water where it was going to play, and that’s not really something you want when you’re so clearly aiming to create fondness through nostalgia.

Tropical Freeze did manage to charm me, and that's laudable. There's a lot here in terms of alternate paths, secret exits, and even an entire extra world you can discover after beating the game once. I don't especially care to explore beyond the critical path, but it's not too hard to dig into if you really do find yourself wanting more. Visually, it's a treat, and mashing the triggers to obliterate end-level barrels and bosses is as satisfying as it was in the 3DS games.

It's far from bad, but it does leave me a little wanting. Tropical Freeze has a lot of potential that could have been built upon further in a later installment, but it doesn't seem as though one is coming any time soon. As it stands, the Donkey Kong franchise is going to stay in stasis for at least as long as it takes for Metroid Prime 4 to get finished or cancelled, as nobody seems interested in picking up where Retro Studios left off.

I did not play the version with the New Funky Mode.