Donkey Kong Country Returns HD 100% completion checklist

Posted on January 24, 2025 by Ethan in Guides, Switch

Donkey Kong games are notoriously difficult to 100 percent complete. In terms of fellow Nintendo Switch games, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze is tough as nails if you’re going for full completion. Donkey Kong Country Returns HD follows this trend – there are tons of collectibles to find, over 80 levels to complete, a time attack mode that takes way too long to load, and an unlockable Mirror Mode that makes everything even more challenging. Take it from us – full 100 percent completion really isn’t worth it here – but if you’re up for the task anyway, here’s the checklist you’ll want to go by.

Donkey Kong Country Returns HD 100 percent completion checklist

There are two modes available in Donkey Kong Country Returns HD: Modern Mode and Original Mode. Of the two, Modern Mode is easiest; you get an extra heart, and you can take multiple items into a stage instead of just one. It also adds the Crash Guard (gives your minecart or rocket barrel an extra hit) and the DK Barrel to Cranky Kong’s Shop. It’s overall much easier to 100 percent complete the game in Modern Mode – Original Mode essentially will just make you die more – so the choice is yours.

All levels clear. This is an obvious one! Each world has several levels, plus one that you only unlock after finding all of the collectibles in that world. After doing this in every world, you will unlock some exclusive post-game levels. You’ll need to clear those as well.
Collect all KONG letters and Puzzle Pieces. These are the two main collectibles found throughout each level. KONG letters are not kept if you die, so you will need to go out of your way to get them again. Puzzle Pieces, on the other hand, only need to be collected once. If you die after grabbing a Puzzle Piece, you don’t have to get it again as long as you clear the level without quitting. The Squawks item from Cranky Kong’s shop is a fairly easy way of finding missing Puzzle Pieces.
Clear every level on Mirror Mode. After you finish the last post-game level, you will unlock Mirror Mode. This challenging mode has you replay every level in the game, but with one less heart and no access to Diddy Kong or inventory items. It’s pretty much just difficult for the sake of being difficult, but if you clear all the levels this way it adds another 100 percent to your save file for a total of 200 percent.

Then we have the Time Attack levels, which is why we don’t recommend 100 percent completing Donkey Kong Country Returns HD. In Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, you can click Retry and the level will instantly reload. This makes it easy to correct mistakes and jump back into the action. This is not the case in Donkey Kong Country Returns HD, however. When you die during a Time Attack level, you respawn back in the stage. However, the timer doesn’t reset to zero. So if you play a level for 30 seconds and die, you’ll respawn at the beginning with 30 seconds already on the clock. This forces you to click Retry to start over… but every time you do this, the game has to load for about 15 seconds. With around 85 levels in the game, if you have to retry 4 times on each one (which is very, very generous – you’ll likely need to retry over 20 times, since the Shiny Gold medals have extremely strict timing), you will be looking at a loading screen for over an hour and a half in total.

We’re not really sure why Time Attack is so punishing in this release – ideally, you should be able to instantly restart a stage each time you make a mistake. Instead, what you have is a “challenge” that essentially just wastes the player’s time over and over again. If you’re somehow able to get a Shiny Gold medal on each stage, props to you – this is one of the most repetitive and tedious 100 percent completion tasks on Nintendo Switch for sure.

If you’d like to read our review of Donkey Kong Country Returns HD, you can do so right here. And you can check out more info about the game over at Nintendo’s official website.