Pyroclastica

At 10 years old, this has got to be the newest game I’ll ever post about on here. I really did not know what I was getting into with this at all, just happened to find a good sale on it
When I started Tropical Freeze, I didn’t even know it was a sequel to “Donkey Kong Country Returns.” Call me a Donkey Kong Kasual I guess.
On this play through, I didn’t sperg out about getting all the extra levels, but did manage to find a few. Honestly, the secret levels are kinda the best thing about this game. Especially the -K ones, those are tons of fun
As a boomer, the controls and “feel” of this game do not resemble Donkey Kong Country to me in any way. Tropical Freeze kinda falls victim to some of the exact stuff that Cranky Kong himself was complaining about 30+ years ago. There are so many animations for every little thing, that it makes character movement feel really slow. But not in that intentional way like Castlevania where levels are designed around this.
Here’s a specific example of the above point: There will be many, many occasions where you’re standing on the edge of a platform and you need to jump over to a platform where there’s an enemy. You know you can’t get enough height to hit them in the head, so you have to wait for them to move away from you, THEN jump on the platform, THEN jump on their heads. However, this is all timed in such a way that when you arrive at this platform, there is not anything you can do besides sit and wait for the enemy to slowly walk to the other side. It feels like a huge disruption to break momentum for no reason like that. This is especially unwelcome considering how long a lot of the levels are.
This happens so often that I started to think maybe I’m missing something. I went and watched some videos of how real pros play this game, and every single time, they got caught where I did, with nothing to do while you wait for an enemy to move away from where you need to jump. This wouldn’t be so bad if it looked like a rare oversight that the QA team just so happened to miss, but it happens CONSTANTLY, which makes me think that for some reason it is intentional.
Like the levels, the boss fights also drag on FOREVER. Remember in DKC2 how the final battle with K.Rool feels? Like he has infinite different patterns and every time you die how much it SUCKS to get all the way back to where you were to try and memorize the next one? That is how every boss in this game feels.
A small ray of sunshine though: brother David Wise did do the soundtrack to this, so while you may be annoyed at big swaths of it, you at least get to listen to some incredible music during.
Overall impression: I like the really hard levels and probably will come back to them, but outside of that, some of the only times I wasn’t bored was when I was annoyed.

Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze