It was several months beforeSuper Mario Odysseyarrived on the original Nintendo Switch, and we don’t yet know when Mario’s going to get his own platforming adventure on the system’s successor. While we wait for that announcement, though,Donkey Kong Bananzais the next major release for Switch 2, andthe next big 2025 game.
There’s a lot of pressure on DK’s hairy shoulders, ushering in the new system and starring in his first 3D platformer since Donkey Kong 64 in 1999. Bananza is a bright and colorful extravaganza, seeing our hero smash, clap, and charge his way through the landscape in search of that all-important Bananzium.
From the very first trailer, it was made plain that the destructible environments, and the scale of the chaos you can cause, would be key to the experience.Now, though, it would seem that all of this action on screen may potentially be problematic for the Switch 2’s hardware.
Speaking toLavanguardia, Donkey Kong Bananza director Kazuya Takahashi reported (perNintendo Everything):
“Because we use voxel technology, there are times when there are major changes and destruction in the environment. We’re aware that performance may drop slightly at these times … At points where large-scale changes occur, we prioritized fun and playability.”
The director was also keen to stress that slow motion and similar effects were added to some of the game’s more smash-heavy moments intentionally. This sort of effect adds tremendous dramatic flair to explosive set pieces, but the concern remains: Just how often will the frame rate drop?
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Performance Maketh The Game
At the end of April 2025,promises of 1080p, HDR, 60fps handheld Bananzawere being bandied around. Just days before the big launch, then,it’s more than a little disheartening to have potential fears of a wobbly frame rate cast a pall over the game’s arrival.
Occasional dips when the action on screen is at its absolute busiest are certainly nothing new in the industry, and sometimes entirely unavoidable. Such a situation is worlds apart from an experience likePokemon Scarlet and Violet, which boasted terrible performance when it arrived on the original Switch.
Even being the enormous Pokemon fan I am, I didn’t complete Pokemon Violet for this reason, finding its performance just too poor to stick with. If it runs as it originally should have on the Switch 2, I’ll finally do so, but that experience surely soured many fans on the series as it did myself.
Other third party experiences on the original Switch had the same effect on me.Vampyr, in particular, was a game that had all the elements I wanted and intrigued me, but just performed so badly that I felt it should barely have been ported at all.
Back with Donkey Kong and Bananza, the game is designed to be a destructive playground of sorts, and completionists in particular are going to pound the environments into pieces lest they miss anything hidden under the surface.It would be a DK-sized tragedy if the hardware couldn’t really support that and was jarringly uneven throughout the adventure.
With the likes of the Steam Deck, Switch 2 has some heavyweight competition for our handheld gaming time. It has to establish early that it can pull off big, busy, content-rich and technically impressive games, and do it well.
The success ofthe character-packed Mario Kart Worldwas a fantastic start, and now Donkey Kong Bananza must step up.Here’s hoping that, after many happy hours with the final build, we can all say that it has.
Donkey Kong Bananza Wasn’t Originally Being Made For Switch 2
Donkey Kong Bananza wasn’t only shifted from the original Switch to the Switch 2 because of hardware limitations.
