Bloodporne
Member
So my wife's cousin dumped a few Wii games into her lap recently and much to my surprise Donkey Kong Country Returns was in there, a game we've both been meaning to properly play for ages. To give some background, both myself and my lovely wife loved DKC1 and 2 back in the day and have replayed both several times in the past few years. Somehow, we never picked up DKC3 but I guess that's a bit irrelevant.
We're currently about 60% to 70% through I suppose so I figured that's enough to get the conversation started and throw out my impressions thus far:
The Good:
-Holy shit is the level design generally fun and creative.
-Truckloads of well-hidden secrets and challenge rooms.
-Cool art design and I'm a fan of the graphics and look in general.
-Challenging and fun boss battles.
-Smooth and precise BASIC controls (*keep reading).
-Feels quite charming and inspired overall.
-Challenging default difficulty (*keep reading here as well).
-EDIT: Soundtrack, and sound design in general, is great.
The Bad:
-Mine cart and rocket barrel level difficulty. I've come to physically dread seeing a goddamn mine cart and/or rocket barrel upon entering a level at this point and almost quit the game during the Cave map. The difficulty spikes for these are off-the-charts for me as I seem to have no real issue with the regular platforming maps.
-Why is Diddy not playable and essentially just a jetpack with extra lives? Odd.
-EDIT: The atmosphere found in the SNES titles isn't nearly as present. I used to love the weather effects and moodiness of those.
-Where the fudge is Dixie?
The Ugly:
-I'm playing with the horizontal controller setup, as in NES style without a nunchuk, and the motion-actived moves are pissing me off massively. The game gets so hectic and difficult in parts with many actions having to be performed quickly in succession that the whole 'oh shit I meant to blow not roll into the abyss' if I don't come to a complete stop is getting tiresome. I feel like nothing was added to the fun factor by relegating important moves to this gimmicky implementation and rolling especially suffers and feels imprecise.
-I can't stress enough how much I utterly loathe mine cart and rocket barrel levels due to their hair-ripping difficulty. Yes, it must be mentioned twice for good measure.
Overall, the game still manages to be really likable despite me wanting to throw the f'ing TV out of the window on occasion. Yay video games!!!