I too assumed it was made on the DKCR engine, but I suppose now that they're working with programmable shaders their old engine probably wasn't compatible.

This does help explain why it took so long, and now that the engine is in place, hopefully their next game will be built more quickly.

Tropical Freeze showed a lot of the typical growing pains we saw other studios go through back in the early days of PS3 and 360, transitioning from SD to HD. Hopefully now that they have experience, their next game will break free of these shackles and really put the system through its paces, like all their previous games did.

It's easy to forget that Retro has been using the same engine (albiet updated each time) ever since their first game. :P

That's one of the things that impressed me most about DKCR; not only that it was totally unnoticeable that it was using the Metroid Prime engine, but that until then they had the reputation as the guys who were "great at Metroid, but what else can they do?" but DKCR proved that they could make a completely different style of game and still do a brilliant job.

Although the biggest reason why Metroid Prime's first-person platforming actually works is because Retro is very good at platform placement.

Big difference between platform placement in a slow moving 3D adventure game and in a fast moving 2D platformer though, haha.