Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D does a lot of things well - it's a challenging platformer that understands what made the original Donkey Kong games tick and updates it for a new generation. The problem is that it doesn't go far beyond the boundaries set by the originals, and some of the fresh additions don't fare well in this port.

Donkey Kong's always been a Nintendo second-stringer, doomed to live in the shadow of the Jumpman he once antagonised. It's been nearly twenty years since a Donkey Kong game was actually at the front of the pack, with Donkey Kong Country on the SNES pioneering the use of pre-rendered three-dimensional graphics in video games and selling 9 million copies during the SNES's lifetime. Even then, though, Kong still came in last to the plumber, shifting fewer than half the units Super Mario World did.

Perhaps that's because Kong's solo efforts have almost never broken Donkey Kong Country's mould, a mould that Mario helped set. The Donkey Kong sidescrollers aren't carbon copies of Mario - Kong's always been more unwieldy and generally harder to control; there's no emphasis on finishing a level on time and more emphasis on preparing your powerups before a level - but Donkey Kong often stagnated where Mario innovated, sticking to the formula (or, worse, following Mario's formula) whereas Mario branched out and explored different avenues. Yeah, there was a time when you could control DK with bongos, but the basic point remains - Donkey Kong got by because it was the harder Mario.

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