Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest (SNES) review "After the release of the ever-lasting Donkey Kong Country, I was anticipating a sequel. I had a great time swinging through the jungle, creeping through caves and riding on cool animal assists. I wanted to experience it again but with all of the minor flaws that it produced corrected. However, DKC2 didn't exactly fix these problems, it just added a few more to the list. "

After the release of the ever-lasting Donkey Kong Country, I was anticipating a sequel. I had a great time swinging through the jungle, creeping through caves and riding on cool animal assists. I wanted to experience it again but with all of the minor flaws that it produced corrected. However, DKC2 didn't exactly fix these problems, it just added a few more to the list.

In this instalment, the vengeful Pirate Leader K. Rool has held Donkey Kong hostage and it’s up to Diddy and a new Kong Dixie, Diddy's girlfriend to rescue him. I was little annoyed because I wasn't able to play as Donkey Kong but I decided to give the game a shot.

Diddy and Dixie play very similar to each other but have a few differences. Dixie can whirl her long ponytail round in a circle (inspired by Miles “Tails” Prower from the Sonic series) and float down to other areas. Dixie is also stronger than Diddy and can use her long hair to throw barrels at bad guys and can also hang on to ropes or hooks to reach higher places. Diddy is identical to what he was in the previous game. I would have like to have seen him with new abilities and such but Nintendo used the exact sprite from the original DKC, complete with original controls. Why didn't Rare give Diddy Kong some new moves? A new ability or an attack to enhance the gameplay . Pressing select will allow you to switch between the two monkeys and the other "switch" button id now used for the piggy back move. Something that throws your partner into the path of the oncoming enemy.

The animal assist feature is back as well. In the last game,it was too rare but here it's quite frequent. It's a damn shame though because all of these new assists are rather poor. Of course, the two older animals like Rambi and Enguarde are the same but the new ones are rather awkward.Rattly the snake is awkward to control as his springy jumps always go further than required or less than needed. Squitter the Spider is a rather innovative yet flawed creature that spits up webs for you to jump on and hurls up bits of web to kill enemies. However, he is as awkward as hell to control, especially when you have to build bridges with his webs, which oftern results in your death. Squawk the parrot has a bigger role in which you can control his flight but one minor change barely compensates for the two awful mistakes.

The virtuous gallery of enemies has once again been slightly shrunk and anything new is either poor or inspired from the original game. The Kremling creatures are still as irreverent and annoying as before. Since they are all pirates now they all have new accessories like a wooden leg or even a cannon. One odd thing was that Diddy could now take down bigger and fatter enemies unlike in DKC, which ruined the "big guy- small guy" balance. The removable of this feature was pretty handy but a bit inaccurate. Other characters that were kind of similar to the original were the Zingers (the two different coloured wasps) and the Klaptraps, although they had a different design, looking bigger and uglier (in a bad way) .

One of the previous game's problems was the repetitive and unoriginal boss characters and they have improved it a little bit. Although the Kleever character was just a bad idea from the start and the fact that you have to fight the Vulture boss twice at two different points wasn't exactly riveting but Apart from that though the bosses weren't too bad. The Klubba crocodile was an awesome concept, a big ass crocodile with a huge club. The final K. Rool boss, who fires big ass cannonballs was also a cool boss, despite his apparent shrinking. It was real mixed bag though, a good few bosses were quite good while a handful really sucked.

Graphically, the game has slight improvements with the newer sprites but quite a few of them have been lifted from the original. Diddy looks exactly the same as before only with a few new animations, which isn’t really anything to sing and dance about. Dixie and other new characters look a lot better and the majority of the new cast produce atmospheric feelings and are decent enough. The brief appearance of Donkey Kong kept me happy as I was glad to see a character I actually gave a damn about and he looked just that same as before. Which is the same premise for all of the enemies and bosses, who have reasonably smooth animation and masses of detail.

Donkey Kong Country 2 was a lot better than what I thought it would be but it was no way an improvement over the original. It did improve some areas but the quality of the actual game was nothing compared to DKC. Useless bosses, overusing poor quality animal assist concepts and the removal of cool animal characters with the replacement of barely useful ones and finally annoying, complicated and dire level designs almost make this game somewhat of a chore to play through.

Community review by goldenvortex (September 14, 2004) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.