Kombo’s Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don’t waste your time. This is why we’ve split our reviews into four sections: What the Game’s About, What’s Hot, What’s Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.
What the Game’s About
When Microsoft bought Rare from Nintendo back in 2002, the developer brought the rights to several major Nintendo 64 franchises along for the ride — most notably Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie, and Conker. It didn’t take long for Conker or Joanna Dark to appear on the scene waving the Xbox brand banner, but Banjo has been left hibernating for almost a decade. In that time, the platform genre has basically evaporated, its key tenets having been absorbed and repurposed in every genre from adventures to shooters. Instead of sticking to the sequel playbook and slapping some next-gen graphics on a 10-year old design document, Rare opted to rethink the entire game and indeed, the boundaries of the platform genre. Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts still offers all of the running, jumping and exploring of the previous titles, but those elements have been retrofitted around a creative vehicle-creation mechanic that lets players think, invent and pilot their way through the game’s challenges.
What’s Hot
The vehicle-building mechanic at the heart of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is the game’s greatest asset, one that recalls — at least for me — the simple creative pleasure of playing with LEGO blocks as a child. Back then I wasn’t burdened by the knowledge that vehicles required a litany of intricate internal workings to function, I merely built things in the general shape that I wanted, threw on some jets and guns and boom, I had a fighter-jet that the American government wished they were smart enough to think up. Sure, it may not have signaled a bright future in aeronautical design, but it sure was fun. The vehicle design in Banjo-Kazooie works in a similar fashion, according to what Rare describes as “cartoon logic.”
The building tools are addictively deep and flexible but incredibly accessible at the same time, a powerful combination that makes it very easy to lose hours tinkering in the garage. Simply build a base, throw on engines, props, fuel tanks and wheels wherever you think they should go, and the game will figure out how the damn thing would move assuming it actually had fuel lines, gears and drive-shafts connecting everything. That doesn’t mean every vehicle will work exactly as you imagined, though. The physics are exaggerated but rooted in some semblance of reality, so deranged contraptions without a hint of logic will often net hilarious Wile E. Coyote results. Honestly, sometimes it’s fun to build something you know won’t work just to watch it fail spectacularly.
The major problem with the older Banjo titles was that they were linear and limiting. Rare created huge worlds for players to explore, but they could only access certain areas once they procured the right Kazooie power-up, some of which were asinine. There were no two ways around a certain obstacle or jump; if you didn’t have the right power-up, you weren’t getting past it, no matter how many other methods seemed to make sense. Nuts & Bolts removes most of those limitations through the vehicle creation component, and the vast majority of the challenges can be completed in totally different ways, with wildly divergent vehicles.
In one case, a long jump challenge tasks players with launching a vehicle past a certain point. Springs, wings, and rockets are all fair game and will net varying degrees of success depending on how the vehicle is laid out. Particularly creative players might find that putting Banjo in a spherical vehicle and using some detachable booster-jets garners the best result thanks to the extra rolling distance. Just a thought. Similarly, a coconut-collecting event can be completed using a vehicle with a pick-up-truck style basket to transport the coconuts from the dispenser to the receptacle, but more creative players might decide to build a chopper with a dangling, spiked mace to hijack the dispenser and hold it directly over the dispenser.
Each of the events also have leaderboards for the best times, longest distance, or most items collected, so competitive players will find plenty of incentive to keep trying. There’s something infuriating about seeing a person that you know is dumber than you with a better time. Moreover, these leaderboards serve well as subtle hints. If you keep getting times around 25 seconds and you see someone has a time of 8 seconds, obviously they’ve approached the problem from a completely different direction. Send them a message asking for a hint, or if you don’t mind begging, ask them to send you their vehicle blueprint. Next time you hit the garage you’ll be able to select their vehicle. These elements of community and competition really add a great deal to the single-player experience.
Say what you will about the quality of Rare’s efforts since leaving Nintendo, their flair for presentation hasn’t suffered one iota. Every game they make is colorful, charming and technically impressive, and Banjo-Kazooie is no exception. More noteworthy than the graphics is the sense of humor present throughout the game. Rare either has the best self-deprecating sense of humor of any developer in the world or they have a truly disturbing level of self-loathing. The introduction to the game nearly had me in tears, as Rare basically tears themselves apart for making supposedly boring, repetitive, uninspired crap. Grabbed by the Ghoulies appears in every waste receptacle you can imagine, from litterboxes to garbage cans, and there are a few obvious jabs at particularly bad collect-a-thons that can’t legally be named (*cough* Star Fox Adventure *cough* Donkey Kong 64 *cough*).
What’s Not
Oddly, despite roundly criticizing themselves for focusing on random widget collection in the past, Rare has done so again with Nuts & Bolts. Regardless of what kind of challenge the player completes, the goal is always the same: earn another Jiggie to unlock a new world with more opportunities to earn even more Jiggies. This is annoying enough for those of us that got tired of Rare’s shiny-object fetish back on the Nintendo 64, but it’s made all the worse by the fact that Banjo basically has to complete his own version of “The Amazing Race” back in the Showdown town HUB world just to deposit the damn things. On top of the Jiggies there are also about 2000 musical notes to find, because you know, you can never have too much random crap to seek out, right? The only collectible objects that elicit genuine enthusiasm upon their discovery are the vehicle parts because those actually have a legitimate impact on the gameplay and tie directly into the fun.
The multiplayer in the game is hit or miss. Some people will love it, but I didn’t have that much fun with it even though I love the concept on paper. The game includes a ton of different modes, but the common thread between them is that success is determined by the best vehicles, not necessarily the most skilled drivers. Those players that spend the most time in the shop and create vehicles that suit their specific play-style per each game-type will find the most success, while those that stick to the default blueprints and trust their maneuvering skills will only find defeat. On the other hand, playing in matches where everyone is assigned the same vehicle is boring. There’s really no option for players that just want to jump in and have some fun, which is really what multiplayer is about, especially for those of us with only a few hours a night (if that) to spare on gaming. Honestly, I think Rare missed out on an opportunity to elaborate on the single-player design. It would have been great to see players set up their own challenges, give players in their party a set amount of time to create a vehicle, and see who was the best craftsmen.
The vehicle controls are going to frustrate some gamers. Like the physics, the controls are exaggerated and floaty, which allows you to immediately tell exactly how your vehicle is reacting to new parts and adjustments. If Rare hadn’t done this it would have made adjusting vehicles incredibly frustrating. It’s honestly not much of a problem with the airborne vehicles since there’s plenty of space to maneuver and most gamers don’t have a set expectation for how airborne vehicles should feel, so most will be able to adjust fairly quickly. Wheel based vehicles, on the other hand, come with certain expectations for weight, momentum and the like, and Nuts & Bolts basically discards all of those expectations in favor of the cartoon physics model. There’s nothing I can say other than you’ll get used to it if you put the time in, but I can understand how some gamers would get frustrated enough in the early going to quit playing the game entirely.
Final Word
Some diehard Banjo-Kazooie fans, a sect I didn’t even know existed until recently, decided to hate Nuts & Bolts months before it was released simply because it eschewed the buddy-mechanics of the first games for the new vehicle-oriented focus. I don’t know if these people noticed, but Banjo-Kazooie has about as much brand equity these days as Bubsy, and the franchise needed to establish a new, interesting identity for itself. The vehicle creation in Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts is one of the most genuinely entertaining gameplay devices I’ve encountered this generation. It’s a shame that the game falls into some decidedly old-school design traps, but there’s still plenty of fun to be had here.
