Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Review

Written by: Darren Cartledge Posted: 4th February 2009

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We get nutty for Banjo.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Details:

Goto Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Game Page

	Adventure
	Xbox 360
	Rare Ltd
	Microsoft

Out Now

1-8

Many gamers believe the platform genre to be outdated by today’s gaming standards, but Rare seem to be quite happy to extend their platform series even further with Nuts and Bolts, but how could they do this without seeming to be behind the times? Simple, make it a vehicle based platform adventure, then poke fun at the series and other games throughout!

It’s fair to say that Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, doesn’t take its self too seriously! The game starts with the aging heroes, Banjo and Kazooie sat taking it easy, sleeping and playing videogames, as years have gone by since their last encounter with Gruntilda, the two heroes are seriously out of shape! Enter Gruntilda, well her skull anyway. With her sudden appearance, the rivals soon enter into a bit of banter that gets out of control, but before all hell can break loose, the Lord of Games (aka L.O.G) appears and announces he has arranged a showdown to determine the owner of Spiral Mountain as he is sick of the squabbling. L.O.G has devised numerous challenges for Banjo to take part in and complete in order to win, whilst Gruntilda has to stop Banjo from being successful, and so the game begins!

Like almost all modern platform games Banjo-Kazooie is set in a central hub called, Showdown Town, where Banjo and Kazooie speed round in their trolley, collecting, notes and vehicle parts. From hear Banjo and Kazooie are transported to various themed worlds where they must complete various challenges to win Jiggy’s. Jiggy’s allow our heroes to unlock new worlds to visit as well as Grudge matches against Gruntilda! Challenges are all fairly simple, and include checkpoint races, you having to defend other characters and the usual, collect object and bring to back to a character. All the challenges are timed, which adds to the difficulty, however most are far too simple and won’t really prove to be to much of a problem for most gamers. This can make the game feel very boring and tiresome to play, especially in the early stages, however if you can stick with it for about the first hour the game allows for customisation like never before in the platform adventure genre.

There are a number of pre-designed vehicles to be used in the challenges in the game, and some require you to use a specific vehicle in order to take part. However, Banjo-Kazooie’s biggest strength comes in the level of customisation it allows the player. Most challenges allow you to create completely custom vehicles! You can create truly one off vehicles from a vast number of parts. That allows you to travel over land, on water and through the air. In the early stages you will be more then happy to use the pre-designed vehicles, however once you have acquired a vast supply of parts most of your time in the game will be spent creating all kinds of weird cars, bikes, trucks, hovercrafts, planes, choppers, and tanks and so on. What you can create is only limited by what you can imagine and the level of customisation really adds a layer of depth to the game. This really does detract from what, without this level of customisation would be nothing more then a simple platform game.

The game single player mode is fairly extensive, with various worlds to explore and challenges to complete in each one. There’s also plenty to do and explore in the games hub, Showdown Town. However, instead of stopping there Rare has also included a multiplayer mode playable on or offline.

The games multiplayer component allows you to take part in most of the events from the games single-player mode with up to seven other players via Xbox Live. The games online element is fun to play and the game performs solidly, it also has a fair amount of lasting appeal as you are free to take your created vehicles online and are also able to share your blueprints with other players, meaning you could come up against one of your own designs when online!

The games visuals, as you would expect from a platform adventure title are brightly coloured and nice to look at. There’s a lot going on all the time on screen and the game performs solidly throughout. Character animation, however, isn’t the best and looks a little dated at times as do some of the character models. The games audio is a little absent at times, and all speech is done through little text pop-ups. Sound effects are fitting with the games graphics style as is the music which has been done well.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts is slow out of the starting blocks so you will have to give it some time to get the most out of the game. However, you won’t regret it as it tries new things in the genre and succeeds taking it to a new level of depth that will keep you entertained for hours.