“Donkey Kong Bananza” came out this week to glowing reviews and a spot on NPR’s list of the best games of the year so far. It’s also, to my surprise, a decent couch co-op game — one of many in a recent wave of tabletop and console titles.
Veteran gamers may want more from the game’s two-player mode, but my wife took to it. She joined me as a “Bananza” side-gunner off-and-on until the climactic end. While I tunneled through layer after layer of a huge underground world, she pointed a reticule at objects, “copying” their material to then hurl at terrain and enemies.
Purple “blast rock” festoons early levels of the game, and we quickly prized it as ammunition. Donkey Kong can pick it up and throw it, destroying the rock and a sizeable radius around it. Player Two can do much more — you can reload just by looking at the rock and snipe at near-infinite range. Even if we ran out of blast rock, normal stone still got the job done. Hillsides and enemies and even bosses never lasted long against my wife’s machine-gun approach. We even once reached an inaccessible island by shooting grass at the target, which gradually accumulated into a makeshift bridge.
This overpowered companion demolished the game’s (already gentle) difficulty curve. I grew up on the challenging “Donkey Kong Country” trilogy and have since devoured its modern “Return” series. “Bananza” references these classics in the occasional 2D excursion, but does not emulate their unforgiving approach. I only started to die by the game’s final levels and usually when my wife wasn’t around to sling her ammo. The final boss took me four tries, mostly because it required me to rapidly switch between “Bananza” transformations — a skill the game doesn’t otherwise demand.
But overcoming tough trials isn’t really the point of “Donkey Kong Bananza.” The game makes you feel like a powerhouse. It presents a world that you can completely reshape to your will; later levels don’t just let you excavate terrain, you can also conjure new platforms by flinging special path-creating material through the air. With a second player, the experience becomes all the more frictionless; more sandbox than jungle-gym.
Despite its laid-back philosophy, “Bananza” invites comparisons to mechanically-tight “Mario” games, falling short of the ambitious “Super Mario Odyssey,” but ranking just above “Super Mario Galaxy” (which features a similar two-player co-op mode, incidentally). It’s snappy and clever — a delightful romp that feels more essential for the Nintendo Switch 2 than even the excellent “Mario Kart World.”
Meanwhile, if you’re looking for games with more robust co-op features, I’d heartily recommend “Sunderfolk,” a game that streamlines the weighty tabletop RPG “Gloomhaven” with a dash of “Jackbox” tech. For an actual analog game, look no further than “Arkham Horror: The Card Game.” Here’s how NPR’s Vanessa McGinnis described it:
“The latest two-part expansion in an acclaimed co-op card game, ‘Arkham Horror: The Drowned City’ finally pits you against Cthulhu himself! New Investigators cards are top-notch, letting you break the normal restrictions of the game to make powerful combos. One new card even lets you transform from one Investigator to another midgame! The story side of the expansion ultimately failed to live up to my high expectations after the ‘Feast of Hemlock Vale’ expansion. But the new mechanics and minute-to-minute gameplay are as challenging as ever and kept my fiancé and me engaged the whole way through.”
There’s plenty more where that came from — check out the full list of NPR’s favorite games (sortable by genre and platform) here.
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James Perkins Mastromarino produced and edited this segment for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Perkins Mastromarino also produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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