Donkey Kong Country Returns

[Kosheh]

From what I played, not too hard. It's a little different than the original DKC games. There's more background stuff to interact with and stuff hidden in it, which can be good or bad. It might mean that the levels aren't as well-designed because they no longer have to hide DK coins in them. Then can just stick it in a venus flytrap in the background. But I'm not sure. I haven't played too much.

Actually, now they have jigsaw pieces (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) hidden throughout the level
My girlfriend and I at NYCC were incredibly concise during gameplay, tried our best to collect everything in sight and had people crowding around us. A lot of dialogue between us and we were definitely working as a team, trying to find every little secret within the first level of the demo...but there are 12 jigsaw pieces in the first level. We only found 8 of them and I have to admit, I was bummed >>;

But that says a lot because that means there's a lot of hidden-ness throughout the game, since that means you're gonna be backtracking to the very first level just for 100% completion!

Ton, how's the gameplay? And for what you said about the background interaction, how does that affect the gameplay?

Gameplay is definitely solid - except Nunchuk controls are really awkward. Most of DK's "unique" moves are done by holding a direction on the nunchuk and shaking the remote, i.e.
rolling attack -> horizontal direction + shake remote
ground slap -> down + shake remote

Background interaction does come into play, but I'm kind of fuzzy on it. Some of the things seem so gimmicky (in the first level, Jungle Japes? there are wild flowers DK can blow on, similar to dandelions by crouching and hitting Z in front of one I think) but then there are some pretty cool things like transition from foreground to background (there are barrel cannons that shoot you to the background which you can play around there and grab hidden things you might see - I think Super Paper Mario did this)

And as I might have mentioned previously, this game is AWESOME in co-op. It's only 2P co-op but you're definitely talking to your friend on the couch a lot more, as you need to pull off combo abilities (?) in order to reach areas, or access something that only DK or Diddy can reach (since the two now have independent control in multiplayer)

It also made me wonder about competitive gameplay which was something I liked about the original DKC, and I asked the Nintendo rep there and she gave me a nice, honest "I don't know" :/