Published by Nintendo and developed by Paon, DK Jungle Climber is the sequel to the relatively innovative GBA game, DK King of Swing. The plot of the game is … somewhat bizarre. Not as bizarre as some, but it’s up there. Apparently DK and his mad monkey crew are busy vacationing on the well-known Sun Sun island. Half-way through their break, DK notices a giant banana on top of a nearby peak. Being the hungry monkey he is, he decides to go investigate, only to discover that the giant banana is actually a giant spaceship piloted by a giant banana-looking alien, logically named Xananab. bananaX backwards – get it? Apparently King K. Rool is back, bad, and hungry for bananas, so the Kong crew team up with the banana alien to save the day. Or something like that anyway – Shakespeare it’s not, but on the other hand, at least there’s some semblance of a plot.
I go bananas for apes.
The game mechanics are enough to make you feel vaguely monkeyish. In a good way, mind you. At its core, DK Jungle Climber starts off as a fairly innocuous 2-D platformer. While players can use the d-pad to walk left and right, the game is really designed to encourage the use of the L and R shoulder buttons to walk left and right. While that seems somewhat counterintuitive at first, it all makes sense the moment one comes across a set of pegs. To traverse one of the many obstacle courses in the game, players must use the L and R buttons to grab hold of pegs in mid-flight. Holding one button down forces DK to spin in one direction or the other, while holding both down stops DK by having him grab hold with both hands. By using the L and R buttons in quick succession, players can make DK “shuffle” across pegboards, kind-of like the great ape he is. Old hands at the original DK King of Swing will notice the addition of the A button as a lunge attack.
Diddy makes a return appearance for most of the game, helping DK through acting as a shield and by extending his lunge attack. A single hit will make Diddy disappear, a rather painful occurrence given his increasingly useful assistance in grabbing items that would otherwise be very difficult to reach. However, it’s better than losing yet another life, something that you’ll get rather used to by the end of the game.
Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing – while life is short and brutal in the DK universe, the bright side is that new lives are fairly easy to come by. For every 100 bananas collected, an additional life is awarded. In practice, it’s fairly easy to sit on well over fifty lives at any given time. However, you’ll appreciate those lives – they provide a nice buffer against the frequent deaths you’ll experience through mistiming various peg grabs and leaps. Overall, the challenge feedback system works remarkably well – while mistakes are strongly punished, encouraging better gameplay, they’re not so onerous to make the game overly frustrating. There are points of frustration, but they’re well enough designed to avoid the trap of ‘too difficult gameplay’.
Various powerups are also available through the game, one of the most appreciated of which is the invulnerability powerup, up to three of which can be collected at a time. Collecting enough jewels gives DK the opportunity to use a crystal star, each of which provides the ability to briefly fly around a stage with no fear of injury. However, movement is still controlled through the L and R buttons, making accurate control essential if players are to use the invincibility effectively.
Caves and flying barrels - what more could one want?
Obsessive compulsives have more than enough to keep them occupied in DK Jungle Climber. Not only are there a multitude of bananas to collect, there’s also hidden through each course a DK coin, K, O, N, and G letters, five banana coins, and an oil barrel, each of which can be used to unlock additional games. The oil barrel even opens up others islands, courtesy of Funky’s Flights. Multiplayer offers a range of climbing challenges, offering up to four players the opportunity to challenge each other to various navigational challenges. They won’t exactly provide a Gears of War experience, but any decent multiplayer at all is a welcome distraction.
The game’s difficulty ramps up at a steady pace – while the earlier levels focus on teaching the core gameplay mechanics, they gradually build into levels which require some degree of coordination. The later levels and bonus material offer some quite fiendish challenges at time – while they’re never difficult enough to encourage players to give up, they’re challenging enough to offer an entertaining gameplay experience. Without spoiling anything, the mirror level is an experience in its own right, and the ghostly level is an amusing take on Splinter Cell. And, the fog level requires some fairly serious thinking if one isn’t to plummet to their doom.
DK Jungle Climber is one of those games that takes a unique control system, a wacky plot, and challenging level design and wraps it up into a remarkably effective package. While it does encourage ‘circular search’ syndrome, there’s enough included in the game to keep most players entertained for a decent time. Overall, it may not be a genre-defining game, but it is an excellent example of the genre done well. While The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is likely to be eating into every DS owner’s increasingly limited available gametime, one could do worse than to play this.
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