Digital Foundry's Technical Analysis of Donkey Kong Bananza on Switch 2: A Mixed Review

For those interested in how Donkey Kong Bananza holds up on the Switch 2 in terms of its technical presentation, the chaps over at Digital Foundry have presented their latest analysis for your persual.

It's mostly positive stuff, with John Linneman praising the destructive nature of the environment, noting how it can grant access to new routes with the game still maintaining a pretty solid camera setup when underground.

The potential issues begin with pop-in, which is frequently present when moving forward in the world. It's then noted that shadow rendering is 'extremely poor' and proves to be quite distracting during gameplay. Lighting is also considered to be pretty dated, and it's noted that Super Mario Odyssey's Switch 2 update removed a lot of that title's visual issues, while Bananza seemingly takes us 'right back to the same types of Switch-like compromises'.

Resolution generally falls between 1080p and 1200p with dynamic resolution scaling. Some aliasing is mentioned with the environment, and it's thought that some areas can look a little 'soft'. In portable mode, though accurate testing doesn't seem possible, it's likely that the game is running at 1080p, so image quality is generally thought to be much better in handheld.

As for the frame rate, there is some slowdown during specific animations, like picking up a banana or on certain camera cuts. Unfortunately, however, it's apparent that performance drops down to 30fps during some boss battles and actually stays there for the duration. This is made even more noticeable with the choppy destruction animation.

Frame rate also drops to around 30fps during photo mode, which isn't entirely surprising, to be honest. Portable mode seems to be a bit better with VRR, but it's still not completely eliminated.

Overall, image quality and performance is described as 'somewhat mixed'. It doesn't seem to be quite so poor that it ruins the experience, necessarily, but it's something that we certainly hope to see addressed in updates later down the road.

According to the source: Nintendo Life.