Disney's Donald Duck: Goin' Quackers (2000)

I played both the PC version and the Dreamcast version, both are actually the same game in everything. I highly recommend the Dreamcast version, the PC version will crash on modern PCs for no reason.

This was my very first Crash Bandicoot game, despite that it isn't a Crash Bandicoot game. It plays exactly like the first games, you move forwards or to the side across a level, dodging hazards, you have an attack button with some delay, you can collect items that allow you to unlock extra stuff, etc.

The good

The music is good but most of the songs are forgettable. The level 1 music is probably the best song in the game.

The controls are responsive and function well. You should be able to make jumps and fight off enemies quite easily, sometimes you may misjudge distance or time a jump poorly, but it is mostly the player's fault.

The voice acting is good. It has most of the cast from the old Ducktales cartoon, they do a decent job here despite that they barely have any lines.

The graphics are decent for their time. The models look somewhat dull but considering this was made using Early 3D technology, they look quite decent.

The game has a lot of attention to detail and references to the Donald Duck shorts. If you change Donald's outfit some of his animations change when he is idle, when Donald gets hurt he becomes invincible and can hurt enemies while he throws a tantrum and after his tantrum ends his animations become completely different.

The bad

The attack is kinda useless. His punch attack has barely any range and if you don't time it right the enemy will hit you right after the hitbox is gone; I highly recommend you to make Donald get hurt so his punch changes to his tantrum attack which has better range and better hitbox.

The game is quite easy even for his target demographic. The game is very easy to beat because it is quite forgiving, you will rarely get hurt and it is very easy to farm extra lives. The only levels that gave me trouble were the time attack levels because they give you very little time so any mistake will cost you the level, the desert level was complicated because it was very easy to fall to the lava and it is a bit hard to aim the turret at the final boss to hurt it.

It plays exactly like Crash Bandicoot, so you won't find anything new here.

Overall

Donald Duck is a very good Crash Bandicoot clone, I highly recommend it to people who want to start playing platformers in 3D or for people who are Disney fans.

This game (or at least the Dreamcast version I played) is pretty easy, very repetitive, unapologetically derivative of Crash Bandicoot, and only modestly more visually advanced than a PS1 or N64 game.

But this era of 3D platformer is my comfort food, so I had a lot of fun playing it. The bosses are silly, the music and animations are pretty great, the unlockable costumes are cute and it doesn't overstay its welcome. It's also pretty interesting that this version was built on a modified Rayman 2 engine (even sharing a few of that game's sound effects).