In this review, we gather our beats in the GameCube game, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. We find out how well this adventure gamer plays.
This game was released in 2005 and i a continuation of the Donkey Kong franchise.
We’ve played a couple games in this series already. We played Donkey Kong for the Atari 7800. That game was fairly average for the most part. After that, we played Donkey Kong Jr. also for the Atari 7800. That game wound up being barely passable. We also played Donkey Kong for the Game Boy. That game wound up being pretty solid. After that, we wound up skipping over large chunks of the franchise to play Donkey Kong 64. That game wound up being an excellent game well worth playing.
Now, we find ourselves coming across this game and we decided to give this one a shot.
The plot is apparently that Donkey Kong wants to be king of the jungle. So, he is going to defeat a nemesis in order to do that. That’s about all we know about this story.
Perhaps the first noticeable thing about this game is the fact that you use the Donkey Kong bongo controller. It is possible to play the game with the standard controller, but the game recommends you play with the bongo’s.
The movements are quite a bit different than your standard play. You use each bongo for movement. Tap the left one once to walk slowly left. Tap the right bongo to walk slowly right. Obviously, the movement is fa too slow to be really all that useful. So, in order to run, it’s actually somewhat similar to early Kirby games where you double tap a direction to run. How quickly Donkey Kong moves dictates how fast you move.
In addition to this, you also have clapping. Clapping is almost your all-purpose move throughout the entire game. Clapping allows you to start a sequence or a level. You clap to quickly collect banana’s, activate fireflies, grab onto ropes, pop bubbles containing banana’s, stun certain enemies, and a whole lot more. In short, when in doubt, clap. Chances are, it’ll be used to accomplish something for the most part.
Finally, there is the jump which is pretty self explanatory.
Throughout the game, you collect banana’s. Each banana, weirdly enough, counts as a “beat”. The more beats you collect, the more overall health you have. If you take damage, you lose some beats. Run out of beats and you have to start over.
Beats also doubles as your overall level score. The more beats you have at the end of a kingdom, the more badges you earn. Get 800 beats total and you’ll get all three badges (bronze, silver, and gold). The color doesn’t matter so much as the quantity of the badges you get. The more badges you earn, the more jungle’s you can unlock.
Each jungle, for the most part, has three levels. There are two levels and a boss level. Sometimes, levels involve racing, but most of the levels just involves a standard 2D adventure style game. The third level, however, is typically your boss fight. You can’t earn beats during these boss fights, but you can avoid losing as many beats as possible.
Boss fights generally fall into one of 4 categories: hand-to-hand combat fights, a fight against a watermelon slinging boss, a fight against a tank, and a fight against a bird.
The hand-to-hand combat bosses involves clapping and the bongo’s. A clap allows you to dodge an incoming attack while the bongos allow you to attack. The idea is that you eventually land a punch to stun your opponent. After that, you tap the bongo’s in alternating fashion quickly to lower the bosses health. Lower the bosses health to zero to win the fight. In some of the more complex fights, you are actually required to miss in order to activate a certain chain of events that allows you to hit your opponent, so expect to sit and figure out patterns along the way.
The water-melon slinging boss allows you the full range of movement. The goal is to wait for your opponent to throw a melon at you. When that happens, you need to clap while it’s close, then touch the flying melon in order to fire it back at the boss. The trick is to be facing away from the boss in order to fire it at that boss. Also, you need to make sure you have a clear line of sight. A hit stuns the boss, allowing you to touch the boss and hammer jump as quickly as possible.
The tank bosses involve an elephant tank. Pineapple plants grow somewhere on the level. Clap to equip one and clap again when the tank is sucking in wind to damage your opponent. This also stuns the tank and allows multiple pineapple bombs to fly out. Use clap to fire as many as possible at the tanks now exposed weakness to cause further damage. This will require the additional plant pineapple to complete the chain and deal maximum damage.
The final boss of note is the bird boss. The bird boss flies around launching projectiles at you. Simply utilize the vine monkeys to fly up and hit to stun the bird. After the bird is stunned, you need to climb back up and jump onto the giant egg the bird is carrying. Pound jump as much as possible to deal maximum damage.
For the most part, these bosses do repeat and similar attack patterns can be found through mini-bosses and more difficult enemies throughout the previous levels.
Now, obviously, you are going to need as many beats as possible entering the boss fight. While you can simply collect the bananas to up your beat count, this is generally a really bad way to play. Instead, you need to try and utilize your clapping to up your beat count. Even with one banana, clapping will allow you to count that one banana as two beats. If you collect a number of banana’s in a single clap, you’ll also get a nice multiplier bonus while you are at it.
The best way to collect beats quickly is to utilize combinations. For the most part, combinations means performing moves without touching the ground. Clap to activate plants, do wall jumps, and bounce on firefly bubbles. Each move gives you a bigger combination. As you go along, clap to get as many banana’s as possible. A well performed combination can easily net you hundreds of beats in a single move. So, trying to accomplish as many of these as possible is generally a really good idea.
In addition to this, there are also mini-games that will help you up your beat count. The most common is the banana grab mini-game between levels. Simply tap the bongo’s in an alternating fashion as quickly as possible to eat as many banana’s within the time limit as possible. A very good score gets you an additional 30 beats or so.
Another mini-game is the one that involves riding the bull. Either you get to perform a series of jumps to collect as many banana’s as possible or you simply try and go for the longest jump as possible. Either way, rapidly tap the right bongo to go faster. This is slightly different than the standard movement where a double tap is how you run. In these mini-games, rapid fire tapping is what you need to do to get further and run faster.
As you beat the jungles, you’ll be able to unlock even more jungles. As long as you’ve collected the right number of badges, you’ll be able to unlock the individual jungles. If you beat all four, you’ll unlock the next barrel, unlocking up to four possible new jungles in the process. Initially, you just need one badge to move on, but as you get closer to the end, each jungle will require more. So, the earlier you can regularly collect silvers and get the occasional gold, the better.
That’s more or less the whole game in a nutshell.
For me, this game reminds me of the gimmicky Super Mario Sunshine where the game was basically reworked with totally different than expected controls. This game took things to a whole new level and required a completely different controller even though there was nothing wrong with the GameCube controller in the first place.
The end result wound up being far clunkier controls. It’s basically the equivalent of an artist scoffing at a pencil set and saying they can draw anything with a felt-tipped marker. Sure, you can probably draw something, but the results might be worse than if you used the specially designed pencils. Jumps and moves that would seem trivial on a standard controller become a rather difficult conundrum. You find yourself spamming movements and clapping in a sometimes vein effort to perform some of the simplest actions. As a result, a vast majority of your gameplay revolves around simply fighting with the controls.
It was almost as if the developers knew that the bongo controls were more or less garbage, but for whatever reason, they stuck with it. So, to compensate, the levels difficulties were greatly reduced just to compensate for it. They did do a great job at making the difficulty level just right, but that only marginally covers for the fact that the bongo controls were terrible in the first place.
Probably the other thing really holding this game back is the overall length. Each jungle takes less than 10 minutes to beat. In all, there is about 17 kingdoms (and not all of them have the three level layout either). So, you can easily beat this in under 3 hours (or have your fill of it before then. This makes for a very short game overall.
The learning difficulty is pretty reasonable, though. You do get time to figure things out. On top of it all, the game throws hints at you to help you better strategize and get better along the way.
Generally speaking, this is another experiment that just didn’t work out on the GameCube. You get the interesting and novel concept of playing a game with a set of bongo’s, but once the novelty wears off, the pitfalls really show through. The controls are very clunky and what is normally a pretty easy move becomes a chore. While you spend most of the game fighting with the controls, you also quickly realize that this is also a very short game – clocking in at about 3 hours or less. In spite of that, the learning and difficulty curve is very reasonable, though the boss fights to repeat a lot. Unless your really into a video game that uses a set of bongo’s, then it’s hard to find praise for the game on this front.
Perhaps the strongest aspect of this game, though, falls on the graphics. The graphics were very impressive for Donkey Kong 64 and it’s great to see this legacy continue with this game. The effects work quite well – especially the lighting effects. Each level had its own look and feel. Very little was repeated and no expense was spared. This game pulls off cartoon movements with very impressive texturing throughout with great success. Overall, the eye candy is quite impressive and is very praiseworthy.
Audio is decent enough. The music has its strengths conveying that goofy style of emotion that so much of this game has. This is especially found through the menu music. The level music works pretty well too, though I don’t find it to be particularly memorable. Sound effects are actually very well done. They add quite a nice layer of personality throughout the game that makes listening to this a joy. Probably the only real pitfall here is the voice acting which generally is very limited. While I didn’t expect a huge amount for a game like this, previous games like Donkey Kong 64 did a better job communicating different grunts and squeaks with different characters. So, an overall decent job.
Overall, this game felt more like a lab experiment than an actual polished game. While there is the novelty of having bongo’s as a controller, that novelty does wear off after a while. What you are left with is clunky and sometimes non-responsive controls. Length also causes this game to suffer greatly with a game that clocks in at less than 3 hours. While the difficulty and learning curves are nicely done, you do find yourself fighting the bongo controls for most of the game. Graphics are impressive and audio is decent. So, a very average game only bolstered by impressive graphics.
Overall
Furthest point in game: Beat the Lychee Kingdom.
General gameplay: 15/25
Replay value: 6/10
Graphics: 9/10
Audio: 3/5
Overall rating: 66%
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
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