Rumoured since the dawn of the system, DK64 was the old snes DKC games fleshed out into fully 3D N64-o-vision.
DKC, as you may remember, was that SNES game that had the pre-rendered graphics which made it look sort of 3D-ish.
So, of coures, DK64'd have to something pretty special graphically.
It fails.
While it is in 3D, and the levels are huge, they're little more than a series of big rooms held together with tunnels, and there's a horrendous amount of scenery pop-up, or, more accurately, fade up, as enemy characters and scenery continuall fade into view just metres in front of your chosen avatar, not to mention an amazing amount of slowdown.
You get five characters to choose to play as- Donkey Kong (the all rounder), Diddy Kong, (the agile one), Tiny (the agile-er one), Lanky (comedy option) and Chunky (bumbling idiot lardarse), each with their own style of play (Straight platform, shooting, puzzle, racing and shifting & lifting respectively), all of which must be used to totally complete a level.
Which is DK64's main failing. To begin with, all the monkeys are fairly evenly matched. They can all run, jump and have a weak attack. As the game progresses, you'll acquire more skills, but you'll only use them in the levels after you get them- making revisiting older levels pointless.
For instance-- you get Chunky in level 3.
In the same level, you recieve two new moves and your characer's items.
You use one move in the first level, by which time you;ve cleared it out with the other kongs.
Now you do this every level. Play it through five times, and only in the last one do you get any real reason to play as all five chimps, as in this level's linearity, makes some parts accessible by only one Kong.
So you basically play the game 5 times through, with a great deal of needless toing and froing.
Thaere's also the problem that the large, chunky nature of the character models and their short range attacks mean that you'll take a lot of damage for no reason.
That said, bar these numerous faults, it's a fairly solid game, the environments are huge, with distinctive styles and high quality textures, the gameply improves in later levels as each monkey has more moves to exploit.
There's also plenty of location-specific musical changes, and the typical rareware humour in the cutscenes, it's just a shame it's so repetitive.
Buy it if... monkeys are your “thing“.
Don't buy it if... you don't like doing the same thing over and over.
Website (C) Mark Kelly 2002-5.