REVIEW: Nikoderiko: The Magical World is the Definition of a Hidden Gem

Nikoderiko: The Magical World has flown under the radar of many fans and outlets, despite being an extremely solid platformer and an impressive debut by indie developer VEA Games. The game definitely wears its inspiration on its sleeves – most notably the Donkey Kong Country series – but the developers managed to shake up the formula enough to leave their mark on the genre. However, even though there’s a lot to love in its many facets, this hidden gem is not without its flaws.

The opening cinematic in Nikoderiko does a great job of setting the tone for the rest of the game. It’s very Indiana Jones-y, with the animal protagonists Niko and Luna exploring an old ruin to find an ancient relic. But then tragedy strikes! Grimbald, leader of the snake-like Cobrings, intercepts and not only steals the relic, but sends his forces out to loot the entire island. Thus, it’s up to Niko and Luna to defeat the bad guys, reclaim the relic, and bring peace to the island and her inhabitants – all while jumping around in style.

It’s a pretty basic story, intended to be easy for the whole family to follow – but unlike the silent protagonists of the Donkey Kong Country games, Nikoderiko has a surprising amount of voice acting that borders on being overly chatty at times. Thankfully, you can skip through the dialogue quickly if you want to get right to the gameplay, but if you do stick around for the dialogue, it’s quite smartly written with a ton of witty banter.

In terms of gameplay, you could honestly consider Nikoderiko as a spiritual sequel to Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze – in both positive and negative ways. I absolutely loved the level design in Nikoderiko; each world has its own theme, and the levels are varied enough in their layouts and structure to keep the game feeling fresh. But when it comes to the enemies, they are essentially reskins of what players could find in previous Donkey Kong Country games. This is not necessarily a bad thing – and there are a ton of enemies to fight in this game – but at a certain point it felt a little uninspired by taking so much inspiration from the DKC series.

Likewise, Nikoderiko has all the familiar trappings of a DKC game in how it handles collectibles and hidden bonus stages. For instance, instead of collecting the KONG letters, you’re collecting the letters NIKO. The overworld is also very DKC-inspired in how you navigate from level to level, and there’s even a “workshop” you can visit to spend your coins in exchange for animal summon tokens and collectible figurines. Again, none of this is a knock against the game, but I think Nikoderiko shines brighter in how it differentiates itself from the DKC series.

Unlike the Donkey Kong Country games, Nikoderiko adds a twist to the gameplay by introducing 3D platforming sections. These sections are more akin to something you’d find in Crash Bandicoot or Spyro, and they add a different flavor to the game that I wasn’t expecting. These 3D sections can also get a little hectic because the enemies will absolutely gang up on you here, whereas they mostly ignore you during their patrols in the 2D sections, but that simply adds to the fun of the game. I do wish you had more control over the camera in the 3D sections, but I understand the choice to keep it locked down. You’re essentially on a roller coaster ride with a specific vantage point chosen by the developers.

Another way Nikoderiko sets itself apart from DKC is that Niko and Luna can wall jump in this game! I truly believe all modern platformers should have wall jumping in them, and VEA Games implemented it quite well here. It adds an extra layer of verticality to the gameplay, opening up more possibilities to traverse the levels and find secret areas and collectibles you wouldn’t be able to get without the mechanic. More wall jumping in more games, please!

Back to the DKC similarities: Nikoderiko has a healthy dose of animal companions, minecart levels, rocket levels, and barrel blasting sections that add to the overall fun factor of the game in some delightful ways. The issue, though, is that none of these things are constructed as tightly as what you’d find in any given Donkey Kong Country game. I don’t think it’s a level design problem, because all of the levels are deeply enjoyable to play. For me, it boiled down to how floaty and slow the physics are. Some of the levels are quite long and quite challenging – which is what I’d usually prefer! – but there’s no way to speed up the progression of the game, so I’d find myself setting the game down and coming back to it after a breather. I really think my concern here would have been a non-issue if there was a “run” button I could press to let me zip through the levels at my own speedier pace.

On a more positive note, the boss fights in Nikoderiko are a ton of fun. Each boss is wildly unique and distinct from the other, requiring different strategies and methods to take them down and progress the story. I even liked some of them more than the bosses found in DKC: Returns and Tropical Freeze, but I do have to say I hated the final boss. It’s a tediously slow battle with a second phase that you don’t get a checkpoint for, and because I kept trying to rush through the slower-paced gameplay, I found myself dying and repeating over and over and over. I finally figured it out, though, and was able to roll the credits, but that final boss was more frustrating than exhilarating.

Also frustrating was the actual performance of the game. Visually, Nikoderiko looks great, and it ran quite smoothly and steadily from a framerate perspective, but the load times. The load times are rough. I timed it, and it took anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds for levels to load. It’s by no means a dealbreaker, and I’m not sure if these load times are exclusive to the Switch version, but the performance was certainly less than ideal in this regard. The only silver lining here is that if you die in the level, it doesn’t kick you back out to the overworld, but instead drops you back at your last checkpoint almost immediately, so you don’t have to sit needlessly through those brutal loading screens. A smart call by VEA Games for sure.

But the last, and highest possible note I can leave for Nikoderiko is David Wise’s excellent score. I love that he was available to lend his musical chops to this game, because it truly elevates the whole experience. In fact, I first heard about this game from a social media post he shared about scoring Nikoderiko, and from the moment I booted up the game, I knew it was his work. The soundscape is definitely more Tropical Freeze than what he wrote for the SNES trilogy, but I love hearing how his composition skills have evolved over the years. If VEA Games ever makes a sequel, I really hope they manage to get Wise back as the composer.

And really, I think that’s the biggest feeling I have about Nikoderiko: The Magical World. It’s a great game, but I would love to see what VEA Games could do next in this world that they’ve created. Yeah, it’s a little rough around the edges at times, and it borrows perhaps a little too heavily from the DKC games, but the fact of the matter is that we don’t have enough games like these on the market. Mario clones are a dime a dozen, but Donkey-Kong-Country-likes are far and few in between. Even Nintendo hasn’t released a new DKC game since Tropical Freeze on the Wii U back in 2014, and the upcoming Returns HD is the Switch remaster of the 3DS port of the Wii game that was originally released in 2010!

VEA Games saw an opportunity to make a game like Donkey Kong Country, one with their own twists and turns, in a market that’s starving for something like this. I’m thankful that they did, because Nikoderiko truly is something magical. It only takes about 6 hours to beat the game, longer if you’re going for all of the collectibles; so, if you’re wanting a nostalgia-fueled afternoon, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more enjoyable platforming experience than Nikoderiko: The Magical World.