Anyone who has played Donkey Kong Bananza can tell you the best part is the natural feeling of destroying terrain. So what if you could do that forever? A roguelike mode, Emerald Rush, will let you smash stuff indefinitely and earn rewards along the way. The paid expansion is $20, and available now.
In Emerald Rush, Void Kong recruits you to gather a new currency, Emeralds. Emeralds work just like Gold does in the main game, but in Emerald Rush you need to collect it quickly. Void Kong will give you quotas to gather Emeralds, and you’ll need to smash like mad for a few minutes at a time to gather them. Each round will also have several special objectives to complete for an Emerald bonus, like defeating a particular herd of enemies, smashing through a certain amount of rock, or high-fiving a rhino. Completing one objective in the chain prompts another, urging you to rush across the map to find it.
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You need to have completed the base game to unlock Emerald Rush, but your abilities will be wiped clean, so you won’t immediately be the destructive force that you built up over the course of the story campaign. Instead, you’ll find bananas mixed into the earth that grant you specific abilities like Turf Surf and Wind Up Punch, or Bananza skills like the Ostrich egg drop. To mix things up, every few rounds those skill-granting bananas are randomly reassigned. Meanwhile, finding fossils will unlock perks like increased Emeralds, higher chances of treasure chests, and so on, and you can stack those perks to multiply their effects.
To aid in your destruction derby, you can make use of fast travel with barrels. Easier modes will give you more fast travels per round, while harder modes will give you fewer, but you can increase them with perks. You’ll also have the ability to instantly spawn a barrel. That counts as a fast travel, but you can use it strategically by, for example, chaining them together to blast across the map and reach new locations.
You can play Emerald Rush in any level of Donkey Kong Bananza, so Emerald hunters will have no shortage of places to explore. In addition, the new mode will add DK Island, a location modeled after the Donkey Kong Country overworld map. You’ll see familiar locations like the Kong Hut, pirate ship, a DK head-shaped mountain, mine cart, and even giant bongos. Cranky, Diddy, and Dixie will be hanging out on the island, and there’s an Easter-egg homage to Candy Kong as well. You can also use banana chips to unlock statues of indestructible characters from the game, which will then decorate your DK Island.
Be sure to check out all the biggest announcements from today’s Nintendo Direct.
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