Review: Banjo Kazooie: Nuts And Bolts (360)

Essentially, every 'jiggy' in the game is earned by improving your skill at controlling a vehicle, your imagination at creating one, or a combination of both. The game's hub world, Showdown Town, does house a handful of hidden jiggies as well, but these aren't the focus. It's a skill-based game of disconnected tasks, not a test of patience. Fans of the old ways may enjoy exploring Showdown Town's districts, traversing rooftops and underwater caverns to gather notes (the game's currency) and crates (containing new vehicle parts), but the crux of the game takes place in the five game worlds, where old friends and foes are waiting to dish out vehicular tasks. You'll never struggle to find new challenges, as a handy mini-map leads the way, and Trophy Thomas keeps records of any you've missed, so you can jump right back in again at any time.

Your basic starting vehicle, a trolley with an engine, will probably be enough to get you through some of the more basic challenges, the easy races or simple transport duties from A to B, and so on. It will soon become apparent that you need specialised contraptions designed for the more difficult tasks - and although you can purchase blueprints for general purposes, the real fun of the game comes from designing your own. The game's garage is where you spend your time tinkering; it's a very simple 3D grid-based interface, so every component lines up perfectly with its neighbour. You won't create anything that looks sleek or elegant; this is more about function. A well-balanced vehicle is necessary for stability. Wheels should be placed far apart, symmetry maintained, weight distributed evenly. There's nothing stopping you from making something completely imbalanced, of course; in fact, strapping twelve engines and monster wheels onto pogo stick with a seat on the top is all part of the insane fun you can have with the game.

Vehicle rules are very simple and quite flexible. Wheels and propellors need power to work, so you need an engine. Engines need fuel to operate. Weapons need ammunition. You can attach these blocks anywhere to your vehicle and they magically work. Naturally, the more stuff you stick on your vehicle, the heavier it is and the more power it needs to get up to speed, but you can simply add as many components as you like and it has a cumulative effect. You could take a stock racecar and 'upgrade' it with twice the power and a cannon on the front... or attach floats, propellors or wings. Or all three!

It's not all about power, though; challenges can have fairly open interpretations and there are often ways to exploit the rules. The real joy is in aiming for the TT trophies, the best times/scores that require a bit of clever thinking. One challenge, for example, pits you in a ring-out contest against a heavyweight tank of a vehicle. Overpowering it with brute force is one option, but you can think outside the box and render it harmless by, say, attaching a sticky ball to it and lifting it out of the ring. Further, you could use its own speed against it, encase it in ice and dodge out of the way, sending it sliding out of the ring without even touching you. Examples of clever thinking are many in Nuts & Bolts; the fact that most challenges avoid specific parameters is what makes them so enjoyable. Many have criticised this as being repetitive, but if you're finding it repetitive, then you're being repetitive. Stop, rethink, and try something different.

Nuts & Bolts is quite honestly one of the most refreshing, imaginitive and ingenious games of recent memory, but it isn't perfect and it does have problems inherent to its new design. The physics that govern the world and its vehicles can sometimes feel like you're fighting against them, rather than the challenges themselves. Because of this, the game doesn't always successfully entice the player into modifying their vehicle over simply trying a challenge again. There's a delicate balance between skill and ingeninuity that sometimes tips the wrong way. This is helped somewhat by the fact that not all vehicle parts are available right from the off. A slow but steady system of unlocking new parts should see you holding off of some challenges until you're better equipped for them, but the game doesn't tell you what to expect or when to wait, so it's left to player judgement. Perhaps having every part unlocked from the start would have been better, but then a lot of them would be redundant.

Nuts & Bolts doesn't have the most enticing of beginnings. A teasing prologue in Spiral Mountain is quickly over when the Lord Of Games (LOG) whisks the duo off on their third adventure. It is a very long time before you're given any sort of free reign. Cutscenes and slow dialogue frustratingly get in the way, and there's simply too much information to take in without context. If Rare were intending to win over a younger audience, they've almost certainly failed by not adopting a more hands-on introduction. There's also something to be said of knowing when to trim the fat off a game that they haven't yet quite mastered; there are plenty of challenges that are either a bit boring or don't allow you to use your own vehicle, limiting their appeal. A bit of Nintendo-like pruning of those levels that just don't work (and there are a few) would have made for a tighter game.

We can't fault the production values, though. Rare's custom-made engine makes for some beautiful vistas. Even their character design has come leaps and bounds since their N64 days (there's barely a googly-eyed vegetable in sight) and the level design work is phenominal. Structurally, Showdown Town is one of the best hub worlds we've ever explored, and artistically, Nutty Acres one of the most inspired. Network sharing technology and leaderboards flesh out the package into a compelling one, with sharable replays and vehicle designs. There's also a fully-featured multiplayer mode with an abundance of filters and matchmaking, which is somewhat redundant as the game's online scene is almost entirely dead now, due to its relatively poor sales.

It's a shame that Nuts & Bolts is so overlooked and undervalued, as it it genuinely brilliant, and shows that Rare does have what it takes to make a classic, even if they misjudge their audiences a little bit. With a little bit of tightening here and pruning there, they could have had a bonafide classic on their hands, Microsoft's answer to Mario Galaxy and LittleBigPlanet combined. It doesn't quite reach those lofty heights, but it stands proudly at their feet, unafraid to do its own thing.

Rating: 9 / 10

Words by Daniel James