Friday, October 29, 2021

SNES Game Review: Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble

 The trilogy of Donkey Kong ends with Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble for the Super Nintendo.  The folks at Rareware had to be clapping immensely to themselves over having 3 of the top 10 selling games on the Super Nintendo and they happened to be the three Donkey Kong games.  A massive achievement for sure, but they all had last impacts on the series that continue to this day and is a very big edition to the Super Nintendo library of great games.  Where does DKC3 rate among those and what do they do well? Let's take a longer look.

Positives:

1. Graphics- You knew this was going to be the case but Rareware did really well with this and again with the different versions of levels in every way possible.  They did an outstanding job again with this and it shows.

2. Differences of levels- There are some where controls are opposite, there are some where you have to have a speedrun mentality, some where you have to dodge a lot of things.  There are more than just layouts with this and it is honestly cool to see them be as interactive as possible with this.  


3. Dixie Kong's skillset- Overall a great skillset much like DKC2 but she plays a much larger role in this one.  There is a reason for that and it is also below. However Dixie Kong does so, so well weith this game and you are so much in debt to her through the game.

4. Music- This is just lather, rinse, repeat.  Great music for Rareware as like the other two games. 

5. Frame rate- Very smooth, very crisp overall and one that does well especially in a streaming mode (Such as I did with this game.)  It is a game that graphically is amazing but with the frame rate is not choppy or slow at all.

6. Difficulty is better- It's not overly easy like DKC1 and not almost impossible with some of it like DKC2.  This is probably the best of the 3 for difficulty purposes. The bosses are a bit more scaled down which is a bit of a drag and will be mentioned below, however the levels themselves have challenges but they do well with making it a challenge but making it fair.

Negatives:

1. Kiddy Kong- Yeah there is a reason I said Dixie's skillset is needed.  Kiddy Kong is just a lumber of a character.  I didn't find much use for him, much like Donkey Kong in DKC1.  I felt other than a couple things, he wasn't worth much value which is honestly unfortunate.  I think they wanted a different character than Dixie and Diddy, but in this case it doesn't work to be fair.

2. Bosses- I felt they scaled down a bit too much other than the final boss.  That still remained a struggle but the rest were more or less pretty easy after a time or at most two.  There were a couple bosses that provided a lot of strategy but you got the main picture of how to beat them easily.

Overall Rating/Rank

DKC 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble is a overall well made game that deserves high praise.  I felt if they kept it with Diddy/Dixie it would have been absolutely splendid and something that made it well worth the praise.  However with Kiddy Kong, it does bring it down slightly.  However that isn't to say this is a bad game, not at all.  This is a splendid game that I would still highly recommend overall.

Overall Rating: 9.1 out of 10, despite Kiddy Kong being here, it doesn't detract from the game in a major sense and the game is actually quite well done overall. 

Overall Rank: I would put this 18th in the Top 20 of SNES games.  It is a very, very well made game and 2nd best of the 3 on the SNES that are Donkey Kong Country.

No comments:

Post a Comment