He's bigger, slower, and blander too! That's not how it goes, but after playing DK64; it might as well be. This game is the poster boy for the old adage that bigger isn't always better. This bloated Banjo-Kazooie clone suffers heavily from extremely tedious and segmented design that thinks trudging all the way back to a switch barrel in those big empty levels just to get a few color-coded bananas that only Diddy could collect along a path filled with bananas that only DK could collect is the most fun you could ever have as a human being. Multiply the frustration by about 5; and this becomes incredibly obtuse as well as repetitively boring. The Kong’s special abilities are only used when the game wants you to use them; making them feel lock & key and not open-ended. All 5 of the Kongs get about a dozen combat options; but almost every enemy dies in one hit anyway. The camera sucks, the minigames aren’t very good and some of them you play several times over, the framerate can slow down miserably, and it’s not so much a platformer as it is a Herculean task of a collect-a-thon. Even if you hate yourself enough to complete it 100% (I did), the only reward for your heroic waste of time is a short, lousy cartoon.
Still, I have to admire just how Rare thrown everything and the kitchen sink at the wall; but sadly only about a quarter of their ideas for DK64 stuck. Most of the boss fights, even though some of them repeat; were actually good, especially the final boss against King K. Rool that actually makes good use of each Kong’s abilities. Also, somewhere around half the minigames can be decent; the best being the minecart levels. Grant Kirkhope’s music score is decent, and the DK Rap is the most besterest song in the universe (Goddamn is it one hell of a hammy song).
All in all; DK64 is the gaming equivalent of eating a disgustingly greasy pizza with about 7 toppings over it.
Final Score: 48/100 (Aluminum Medal)