Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (Xbox 360)

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts has a rather conflicted relationship with the series legacy it inherits. At times it is utterly reverent to the Banjo-Kazooie games that came before it. One of its worlds, Banjoland, is literally built from parts of the 3D platforming worlds seen in the first two games. A great deal of music and characters return and are spruced up or reimagined. The game happily references the past to the point the game’s end challenges expects you to have some knowledge of the first two entries. However, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is not a 3D collect-a-thon like its forebears, and at times it almost sounds embarrassed by them. While masked behind humor, bitter barbs bemoan the shift in preferences for the general public and condemn the old styles of play, and even other Rare developed games like Grabbed by the Ghoulies are routinely bashed as if the creators feel insecure. Despite this, the game boldly pushes into new territory with a gameplay style that could be best described as vehicular problem-solving, its conflicted relationship with the series’s past not stopping it from putting new ideas forward while also feeling like it is very much a Banjo-Kazooie title.

Funnily enough though, the game starts by outright pausing the game before it gets going. The bear Banjo and his red bird pal Kazooie have taken it easy after defeating the witch Gruntilda on a few occasions, the two getting fat and lazy while Gruntilda is reduced to nothing but a skull. While neither side is in shape to reignite their rivalry, they seem poised to fight once more only for an unusual interruption comes in the form of the Lord of Games. L.O.G. is an almost god-like figure who is supposedly responsible for creating every video game, including the previous Banjo-Kazooie titles. Wanting to help the beard, bird, and witch settle the score for good, he aims to facilitate the new conflict with a more hands-on approach, right down to helping them get into fighting shape rather quickly. However, displeased with the 3D platforming format the series was known for, he urges them to shift into conducting their contest by way of crafting vehicles. L.O.G. takes the trio to Showdown Town which connects to a set of other worlds for them to get the hang of vehicle construction and problem solving in, Banjo and Kazooie occasionally taking on Grunty but more often instead needing to speak with other characters and solve their issues.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts takes this idea of a Lord of Games presiding over the competition even further, each of the worlds not only sometimes showing their artificial nature with things like the clouds and sky clearly being props, but the characters you encounter are even playing roles specific to the location. Mumbo Jumbo, a shaman from the previous games, serves as a mechanic to help you build vehicles normally, but in the different worlds he might play the role of a farmer or a helpline operator. Recognizable faces like Humba Wumba and Bottles the mole also play dress up and treat it all almost like a theme park, but you also have stranger pulls like Mr. Fit the exercising aardvark back that shows an interesting focus on not just referencing what is most recognizable. In fact, the level Logbox 720 which is meant to look like it takes place inside a giant game console has a game disc for the little known puzzle games It’s Mr. Pants displayed prominently, Rare still certainly wanting to lovingly show off even the stranger corners of its past while the same characters it brings back might whine about modern gaming during their usually comedic and character-rich conversations. There is some new blood, Pikelet a fairly forgettable pig who acts like a bully, but Trophy Thomas the cheetah at least makes himself memorable by being the face of the game’s harder challenges.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is very much not a 3D platformer. Banjo and Kazooie can move about on foot and have a few basic attacks, but they are very slow to cover ground and their jumping is not fit for the huge environments they find themselves in. While Showdown Town gives them a little more room than most spaces to explore on foot, the game’s set of five worlds rarely give you much reason to leave the vehicles you create. To unlock the final showdown with Gruntilda you must acquire Jiggies, golden jigsaw pieces often given out by characters for completing the challenges they provide. Every challenge in some way asks you to utilize a vehicle to clear some sort of trial, and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts can be quite creative in manufacturing unique challenges. One thing that helps is that you are truly allowed to construct a vehicle from scratch, building its body and attaching parts that perform their functions with little fuss. Put some wings on a vehicle and it can be a plane, put some floaters on it and now it’s navigable in water. You don’t need an understanding of rudders or airfoils and the like, and a lot of upgrading as the game goes along makes simple sense. The stronger and larger engines make you go faster, the new body pieces you unlock or find are tougher, and while this does mean an optimal vehicle for clearing challenges can eventually be made after clearing the game, most Jiggy challenges are meant to at least be cleared with what’s available at the time when they’re unlocked.

At the same time, vehicle pieces are usually pretty responsive. If you include a tray for carrying cargo, you can use your magic wrench to easily stack things in it unless they are meant to be difficult to arrange as part of the challenge. Getting some useful boxes piled up will defy physics a touch just for you while also tumbling if you’re too careless, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts having a good sense for the line between convenient and implausible so you can’t just turn upside down without expecting to lose some cargo. Vehicles can still be unwieldy, some wheels have stronger grip for example so on certain roads you’ll want to use it to avoid slippage. Weapons like your egg gun have mild homing to make it more likely to hit things, but a strong laser requires you to be more precise and even weapons with stronger homing like torpedoes have their limits on how much they can adjust their flight path. You may still find moments where you can’t quite parse why your vehicle isn’t handling the situation well, but figuring out an optimal vehicle for the current challenge isn’t too fiddly a process. When starting a challenge you get a good idea what you’re getting into and a recommendation on what kind of things to include in your vehicle, and you aren’t just building a new vehicle every time a challenge comes along. You can save blueprints of useful designs you make yourself, edit them in most situations outside of an active Jiggy challenge, and if you aren’t feeling too creative, Humba Wumba sells blueprints of her own that can quickly give you a more specific model to utilize or lightly adjust to your current needs.

The problems your vehicles need to solve can come in a wide range of forms. There’s the unsurprising presence of races, perhaps a few too many in fact, but there are battles, deliveries, and more complicated tasks that can be approached in a few different ways. Need to cool something down? Find a way to transport it to a body of water, or maybe just uses some sprayers yourself. Need a way to knock over a great deal of structures? You can make a huge pusher vehicle or maybe utilize some powerful weapons in a smart way. Optional Jinjo challenges exist in each world that comprise of things like trying to hit a Jinjo ball as far as possible or even compete in a sort of sumo match where you have to push the Jinjo ball and avoid being shoved around at the same time. You can definitely find some concept overlap, but battles can take on a range of unique forms too. Flying foes may be bombarding a set location, so maybe hunkering down in a tank could help. Mr. Patch the inflatable dinosaur won’t take damage under normal fire, the player needing to make maneuverable aircrafts to get to his weak points. Some challenges even force you into specific vehicles just to see if you can overcome their intentionally unusual design or serve as a chance to introduce a new concept to you. While there is some repetition that doesn’t always ask you to get creative with modifying your rides, there is still a lot of room to get creative with how you overcome a trial and it doesn’t feel like you need anything super complicated to earn most of your Jiggies.

Jiggies aren’t the only collectible though. Each challenge has three reward tiers based on a relevant metric like the time it takes you to clear it or how many points you earned. Music Notes are the simplest reward, these used as currency back in Showdown Town for things like Humba’s blueprints and new parts, but the Jiggies are usually the standard reward for truly clearing a challenge while a T.T. Trophy serves as a more interesting extra objective attached to each goal. Getting Trophy Thomas’s trophies requires you to go above and beyond a bit, meaning you’ll need more effective designs and strong handling of your vehicles to actually earn these extra collectibles. Much like getting the Jiggies, getting these feels achievable when they’re first encountered even if later acquisitions can make them easier, but earning a trophy can feel like a satisfying feat that rewards you for mixing together your planning and handling well. They aren’t required to make the challenges pack a punch nor do they feel like they often require anything unreasonable, the trophies a nice extra layer on a game with plenty of other things to do already. Not only does the game strangely unlock different levels for the world out of order so you don’t burn out doing so many tasks in one location, but Showdown Town gradually opens up to provide more rewards for exploration. In town, Klungo delivers on the throwaway joke of becoming a game developer after Banjo-Tooie as you can play his very difficult yet simple platforming game Hero Klungo Sssavesss Teh World and the Jinjo Bingo eventually rewards you for your investment in helping the Jinjos out. Some things like the bingo do perhaps delay gratification too much, it taking a lot of work for little reward. There’s even a multiplayer mode where you can turn your creations against other players, some like a race or battle mode expected, but there’s also a long jump, golf game, and other little challenges where you can try to show off your vehicle making skill or get more involved in using your creations against something that can more intelligently fight back.

THE VERDICT: While Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts’s creativity can run a little thin as you reach its final Jiggy challenges, there are still plenty of inventive situations to tackle with an intuitive and easily understood vehicle customization system. Tackling such trials and especially earning the T.T. Trophies does give you the personal satisfaction of being the designer of your success, but there are still systems in place to avoid potential frustrations or allow you to make your blueprints work across multiple challenges without much alteration. The goofy tone, fun characters, and imaginative worlds help smooth over fiddly moments or facing yet another race that doesn’t get the gears in your head turning much, but those moments where you destroy a tough challenge with the right tweak keep the game exciting and rewarding.

And so, I give Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts for Xbox 360…

A GOOD rating. Were the Banjo-Kazooie series a healthy enough one that it could divert into a new play style with little incident, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts likely wouldn’t have so many detractors. Rather than a revival of a moribund franchise that shifted things radically, its inventive approach to puzzle solving that mixes well with vehicular action could just be another adventure for Banjo and the crew, and the game definitely feels like it wants to be for the fans with how many loving references it makes to the past. At the same time though, it feels the pressure of being the first game in the series to release after eight years of silence, and while some sarcastic wit is fun, it also feels rough to see the developers clearly uneasy about their spot in the gaming landscape as a whole. Thankfully, it’s more occasional observations rather than constant reiteration despite coming off a bit strong at the start, and it’s a bit easier to approach the goofy worlds and characters of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts once you start digging into the interesting objective designs and how you can craft a vehicle to overcome them. While it starts to run out of truly unique Jiggy challenges as you start nearing the end, before then it has a pretty good sense for how often it requires you to enter the garage. A fast car will be a viable option for races for a while, and when it starts failing, you can pop on the fancy new engines you’ve acquired or quickly alter the trouble it’s having and try again. There are definitely going to be fiddly moments as you encounter new problems you need to learn the counters for or perhaps you keep making changes but can’t quite identify the flaw, but this can also lead you down the path of designs that approach the problem from a new angle. Keep losing a race? Try burdening the opposition with ballast you stick to them. Need to reach somewhere high quickly? Well sometimes less vehicle means a quicker ascent. The child-like logic works very well in keeping things clean and avoiding being bogged down making vehicles too bound by the laws of physics, so Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts can craft challenges that require deft handling without it being constantly undermined by a few imbalances in your construction so long as it’s not too absurd.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts kind of brought some of its poor reputation on itself by at times being dismissive to its past, and it’s certainly a shame since after you push past some of that weak confidence the game has in itself, you start to see not only a great deal of what makes the Banjo-Kazooie series great as a whole, but an entertaining game that values creativity but while not punishing players who might prefer to lean on lightly altered bought blueprints to get by. Enough reward can be found in the building and the action that you can find a great deal of inventive tasks to complete before you start getting to the retreads or ones that get a bit too touchy about your performance. Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts feels like a worthy part of the series, one with interesting ideas and a lot of what players loved in previous entries, but forging a new path lead to some players falling away like pieces off some of the ramshackle vehicles you construct. Perhaps with time its image can be repaired, and while a magic wrench won’t be able to reattach them with the same ease it can fix your vehicle on the fly during a challenge, it is clear there is a quality game here for those who know what they’re in for.