| Squeakthedragon said: DKCR is not that hard at all. Compare it to a NES Megaman game and it's almost a walk in the park. The one complaint about difficulty I believe is valid lay in the bosses. The bosses in the game are flawed because of the premise behind their design: they ape (pun not intended) the style of Rare's DKC bosses in the original SNES games. Retro tried to fuse that with the scripted, timed gameplay style of DKCR's stages, but here's what happens: 1. The bosses do not have big, "splashy" animated tells to let the player see clearly what they're about to do next. Randomness in boss patterns is not bad; that creates challenge. Bad tells /is/ bad, and the tells are mediocre in this game's boss designs. The thing is, that is a general problem Retro struggles with in their games - the Metroid Prime trilogy has some fantastic bosses, but they can be frustrating due to vague or misleading "tells" with poor timing. 2. The scripted and timed nature of DKCR's stages causes boss battles to be dragged out artificially with lots of "dead time" between major attacks. The worst offender is the mine cart boss. The player ends up standing on his cart for long, dead seconds waiting for the next phase to begin. The problem is that since the bosses are hard, when you die you have to start the entire tiring process over. For a game that's as viciously exciting as DKCR, its bosses feel out of place and work against it. But bosses aside, the primary stage design is brilliant, and its tough difficulty that expects the player to man up is a breath of fresh air - especially because the stages are so fun to play, dying and restarting is exciting, not discouraging. |
I agree that the bosses aren't all that great due to their scripted nature, but in the 4th boss, you don't have to wait for the train to get close to you. You can do a roll jump to make it, even better with diddy kong.
