Donkey Kong Bananza has the reviews of a GOTY contender

Published:2025-07-16T09:50 / Source:https://www.polygon.com/awards/613358/donkey-kong-bananza-goty-contender

Donkey Kong Bananza, Nintendo’s Switch 2-exclusive platform game, has received glowing reviews that catapult it to the front of the race for Game of the Year.

At the time of writing, shortly after the review embargo lifted, Bananza has a rating of 91 on review aggregation site OpenCritic and 90 on Metacritic. (Sadly, you’ll have to wait a while for Polygon’s own review, as Nintendo did not provide us with a pre-release version of the game.)

IGN’s Logan Plant awarded Donkey Kong Bananza a full 10/10 “Masterpiece” rating, calling it “a truly groundbreaking 3D platformer.” Eurogamer’s Alex Donaldson was a little more mixed in his four-star review, saying, “When it smashes, DK really smashes. When it doesn’t… Well, it’s no [Super Mario] Odyssey, right?”

Donaldson invoked Super Mario Odyssey because Bananza was developed by the same Nintendo team; it’s the first Donkey Kong to be developed in-house by Nintendo in Japan in 20 years. Nintendo, also apparently working on a Donkey Kong movie, seems to be placing a new focus on DK as one of its most important characters. Going by these reviews, the strategy of bringing the big ape’s latest game in-house is working.

Donkey Kong Bananza is now one of the best-reviewed games of 2025, alongside the likes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Split Fiction, Blue Prince, and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. In turn, that makes Bananza a contender to be reckoned with in the competition for Game of the Year, the top prize at The Game Awards in December.

The Game Awards jury is mostly made up of a broad international selection of specialist and mainstream media outlets, so a good (preferably 90-plus) rating on the review aggregation sites — which also sample widely among critics — is a good indicator of strength in the awards race, with some caveats.

One of those caveats is genre bias toward cinematic, story-focused action-adventure and role-playing games, which might have counted against a family-friendly game like Bananza in the past. But last year’s GOTY win for Astro Bot, a game very much in the mold of Nintendo’s great platformers, opens the way for DK to push through to the front of the field this year.

An interesting, positive behind-the-scenes narrative is also appealing to the jury, which is one reason I think Clair Obscur — a left-field, mid-budget title from a first-time developer and upstart publisher taking the fight to the big boys — is the current front-runner. “Nintendo makes excellent platform game” hardly qualifies in this regard, although the return of Donkey Kong — one of gaming’s earliest stars — to prominence on Switch 2 with his first major production in a long time is quite an appealing story.

Even if Donkey Kong Bananza doesn’t manage a Game of the Year nomination come the end of the year, Nintendo can consider its mission accomplished: Donkey Kong Bananza has done what Mario Kart World couldn’t quite manage, and delivered Switch 2 its first must-play critical hit.

Source:https://www.polygon.com/awards/613358/donkey-kong-bananza-goty-contender

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