Donkey Kong Country Returns HD
Image: Nintendo

Donkey Kong Country Returns HD swung onto Switch earlier this month and it's a perfectly good time. Nothing we haven't seen before, but still a good bit of fun. That is unless you want to play some of the later stages in co-op, it seems, because fans have discovered an oversight that sucks all the fun out of platforming with your pals (thanks for the heads up, GamingReinvented).

As shared on YouTube by the wonderfully named DK fan channel, Kong Kompendium, Returns HD has a problem with its co-op combat: two players can't bounce off the same enemy. It might not sound that weird on paper (heck, Mario does it all the time), but such an ability becomes pretty crucial as you progress into the game's later stages — where bouncing on enemies is the only way to proceed — making a full co-op run on Switch far from ideal.

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The original Donkey Kong Country Returns on Wii overcame this problem with a platforming 'buffer', where enemies that had been previously bounced on hung around for approximately 25 frames, giving P2 just enough time to take the same route themselves. The 3DS version got rid of this workaround for the standard one-and-done approach to jumping on enemies — something it could just about get away with thanks to its reduced focus on co-op play — and it seems the Switch has followed in the handheld's footsteps.

It's a difficult oversight to describe (and we recommend checking out the Kong Kompendium video below to see it in action), but the TL;DR of it is that the co-op becomes about trying to "conserve platforming resources" rather than taking the intended route — and looking at the following example from the 'Platform Panic' stage, "conserving" isn't always an option.

It's not enough to consider the game necessarily "broken", and the problem will only apply to those playing in co-op, but come on. A big selling point for the Switch HD remaster is the chance to play with a friend on the go, and right now, that looks like a pretty hair-pulling experience.

Maybe Forever Entertainment has a patch in the works. Maybe. Until then, however, fire up the Wii.

Have you seen this platforming problem in action in DKCRHD? Let us know in the comments.

[source youtube.com, via gamingreinvented.com]