A solid enough platformer. Donkey Kong feels great to control and the levels are perfectly bite-sized with a lot of detail in the set pieces. I'm not opposed to the tough difficulty, but a lot of the deaths feel cheap, from sequences either requiring more precision than is warranted or the game simply not giving you enough time to react to upcoming obstacles (possibly a result of the port to 3DS leading to a smaller screen size than originally intended), and many times the checkpoints feel too far apart to justify how tough the levels get. There is an easier difficultly option, which might make these issues a bit less egregious (I dunno, I didn't play on it), but the inability to change your difficulty settings without creating an entirely new save file keeps it from being all that helpful.