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Rare has been an interesting developer to watch since their partnership with our favorite green-themed console. Their initial success with gems like Donkey Kong Country and Banjo-Kazooie created some pretty huge expectations when the guys with the golden R jumped ship. Kameo notwithstanding, Grabbed By The Ghoulies and Perfect Dark Zero didn’t exactly set the world on fire. In 2008, Rare was looking to improve their hit or miss track record by bringing back the bird and the bear...but did they succeed with Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts? The answer is an interesting one.
Gameplay:
If you played the original Banjo-Kazooie, you might remember its smooth controls, its bizarrely unique but familiar, comfortable style, and its quirky, lovable sense of humor. A lot of that is still in tact in Nuts & Bolts, including the quirky sense of humor. It has been eight years since Banjo-Tooie,and so the beginning of Nuts & Bolts sees Banjo and Kazooie both out of shape. The duo is relaxing after retiring from the life of adventuring game heroes. In fact, Kazooie has even managed to pick up her own Xbox Live account along the way (the only thing Banjo has seemed to find is pizza). Of course, retirement is a hard thing to come by if you’re a game character...just ask Megaman. With that in mind, the evil witch Gruntilda (or what’s left of her) emerges from the rubble of her last failure to challenge the dynamic duo once again. As suddenly as the game begins, a mysterious and all-powerful character named L.O.G. literally pauses the action and decides to thrust the three characters into a new game world for a new duel. The dialogue is priceless, and in the tradition of poking fun at itself, L.O.G.’s first edict in Nuts & Bolts is to have the player “Collect as many pointless items as possible!” Sure enough, you’ll be collecting Jiggies (Jigsaw Puzzle Pieces) in no time. Mario has his Stars, and Banjo and Kazooie have their Jiggies.
Like its predecessor, Nuts & Bolts still enjoys smooth and solid gameplay, but the style of the gameplay is where there’s really a huge deviation. This is where the Nuts & Bolts tag comes from. After L.O.G. deems Banjo and Kazooie’s old moves obsolete, he sees fit to replace the old moves like the “Flapflip Jump” and the “Talon Trot” with a wrench and a... Well, it’s called a trolley, but it looks more like a petroleum powered shopping cart to me. In any event, rather than using moves to overcome obstacles and progress through the game, the player is tasked with the job of becoming a miniature engineer. While players can simply choose to use pre-constructed vehicles like racers, motorcycles, trucks, tanks, boats, planes, helicopters, and hovercrafts, the real fun is going into the garage yourself and creating your own vehicle. The parts can be found by beating challenges or finding crates, and blueprints and even more parts can be bought using the game’s currency, the old school Music Notes from Banjo-Kazooie. The hub of the game is Showdown Town, where there are a variety of ways to spend your Music Notes if you don’t want to use them on parts. You can upgrade Banjo’s speed, health, and strength at the gym, or pay a trip to the arcade or the casino.
The vehicle based gameplay is really fun and unique in the control it gives the player. While you can only use the basic shopping-cart-trolley in Showdown Town, you can use any vehicle you want in the various worlds you explore, such as the Xbox 360 parody world LOGBOX 720. From the creation of the vehicle to its use, the player is in control with few exceptions (occasionally there is a “L.O.G.’s Choice” challenge). Being able to stick as many wheels, spoilers, or engines onto a vehicle as you want can be tremendously fun, and gives you the freedom to make a ride that looks cartoony, sleek, or downright ridiculous. All the while, players have to consider realistic physics designing their ride. Could you make a rolling tower that goes at breakneck speeds? Absolutely...but you’d sure tip over a lot. You can change vehicles on the fly unless you’re in the middle of a challenge, and you can rebuild vehicles or simply destroy old, saved blueprints if you need more parts. The controls are simple and easy to use. The left and right stick are movement and camera, of course, and the right trigger and left trigger function as the gas and breaks, respectively. A, B, and X work any optional weapons or accessories you may have attached to your vehicle. The right bumper flips your vehicle if you get in trouble, or pulls back parts that get knocked off. Everything feels smooth and simple. You never really have to pause to think about which button controls what.
One thing did bother me, though, and it was the complete removal of traditional platforming. It didn’t bother me in respect to it being different from Banjo-Kazooie’s traditional gameplay, but it did leave me feeling like there was something missing. Banjo can climb out of his vehicle, climb up poles, and walk tightropes...and that’s it. The only ground attack is a spin with the wrench, and the only aerial attack is a spinning overhead smash with the wrench. In practice the attacks feel like a polite nod to Crash Bandicoot and Sonic the Hedgehog, since you’re never really going to use the attacks when you can just drive over a bad guy instead. It seems even stranger still that Banjo AND Kazooie are in the game, since they don’t really work together at all. Kazooie serves no purpose aside from holding the wrench, and Banjo drives the vehicles. Where is the real “teamwork?”
It seems as if the game could have been made twice as deep if it focused on, not only the vehicle gameplay, but the traditional Banjo-Kazooie gameplay as well. I think the game definitely had room for both, without sacrificing the attention to either, but we’ll just have to wait for Banjo and Kazooie’s next outing to find out if that’s true or not.
Graphics:
To paraphrase Adam Sessler, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is such a pretty game that I feel like I have to clean myself up a little before I sit down to play it. N&B does a lot of things really well. Fur shading? Check. Feather shading? Check. Gorgeous water? Check. Amazing draw distance? Check. Beautiful textures near or far? Check. The only complaint I really have with the graphics was a texture “blanket” on a world like Nutty Acres, for example. Nuts were supposed to be piled up in an area, and rather than having each nut individually rendered, they were part of a somewhat blocky looking blanket of “nut texturing.” It didn’t look bad per se, but it stood out as a stark contrast to the beauty around it.
What I liked most about N&B was the original art style used in the game. Every character and vehicle and vehicle part and environment feels different than what you’ve seen before. The grass looks great, yeah, but it isn’t just your typical “generic pretty grass” that we’ve come to expect from this generation of videogames. To once again use Nutty Acres as an example, the grass is “sewn” into the game world, and you can see the seams and stitching keeping the patches of grass held to the ground. The clouds in this same world are patch-work as well, and can be seen hanging from the sky on cables. In the LOGBOX 720 world, Rare’s Xbox and Xbox 360 game discs are seen scattered throughout the level, decorating the world with nostalgia. It’s the little things like this that really leave me smiling and appreciating the work that went into the visuals.
There is one final, important note about the graphics. In standard definition, the text is completely unreadable. This doesn’t matter squat if you have an HDTV, because the text will be large and clearly legible, but on a standard definition the legibility is somewhere between “unreadable” and “eyestrain.”
Sound:
I absolutely love the music in Nuts & Bolts. It is so smoothly integrated into gameplay that it feels like a part of the game itself, rather than simply being a tune playing in the background. As you travel through different areas of Showdown Town, the music will seamlessly change instruments and pacing to match the area. The same can be said of each uniquely themed world you explore, so while there are very few unique pieces, there are so many variations and remixes of those pieces that the end result sounds like dozens and dozens and dozens of unique musical scores. It really is a marvelous game to listen to.
Interestingly enough, there is no voice acting to speak of (no pun intended) in Nuts & Bolts...with a teeny tiny exception for a narrator. Banjo, Kazooie, L.O.G., Gruntilda, and every other character in the game grunts, squawks, and “guhs” their way through the text dialogue. It’s something you’ll either love or hate, and can be hard to describe if you haven’t actually heard it first hand. I personally found it charming, as it took me back to the original Banjo-Kazooie and felt like a retro throwback. Chances are there won’t be many middle ground reactions to it, though. The only concern with this is that, in tandem with the unreadable-in-standard-definition-text, you will not know what the hell is going on if you aren’t playing on an HDTV.
Longevity:
Nuts & Bolts will take you a pretty good while to finish, especially if you’re a perfectionist and/or a completionist. Beating a challenge is possible on three levels with varying bonuses for greater success, and a lot of the challenges can really make you think about how to use your parts and your vehicles wisely. Nuts & Bolts will keep you busy for a while with all the stuff there is to find and do, but it’s still a straight shot for the single player game and there’s never really much incentive to revisit past worlds unless you forgot something. There’s a multiplayer feature attached as well, and while it is cool to use your vehicles in online games, it isn’t really a deal maker in comparison to the single player game. The nicest feature I found in regard to the online features was the ability to upload and download vehicle blueprints. I’ve written before how much I would like to see more developers take advantage of features like this, so it is most certainly a welcome addition here.
There is also a little longevity incentive attached for those of you who decide to buy the original Banjo-Kazooie from the Xbox Live Arcade. While it’s minor, there are new Easter Eggs (literally) you can find in the original N64 game that will allow you access to exclusive upgrades in Nuts & Bolts. It’s another small but cool feature packed into the game. While I wouldn’t recommend buying the arcade game JUST for this purpose, if you already have it or plan to get it eventually, it’s a great addition of which you can take advantage.
Overall:
Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts acts out its premise. It takes an old game, disassembles it, and puts it back together in a new package. It does just about everything right, but it can feel like there’s something missing in the gameplay that keeps Nuts & Bolts from being a true masterpiece of platform games. However, it manages to succeed in being not only playable for all audiences, but enjoyable as well. That is something far more games should focus on achieving, especially when Nuts & Bolts does such a commendable job in that regard. With so many other good games available on the market right now, Nuts & Bolts offers something fresh and different in a solid showing that is more than just another stale take on a tried-and-true genre.
| Review By: Jared Brickey - Overall Rating 8.5 (out of 10) |
| Gameplay: |
8 |
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| Graphics: |
9.5 |
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| Sound: |
9 |
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| Longevity: |
7 |
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| Overall: |
8.5 |
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