Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

Did Rare manage to piece together a worthy title?

	Version 360	Developer Rare	Publisher Microsoft	Genre Action/puzzle

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Nuts & Bolts looks, on the whole, fantastic, boasting fine texture-work, a draw range worthy of the Hubble Space Telescope and gorgeous, Super Mario Galaxy-esque lighting - the globular foliage of the Nutty Acres world has an unreal, star-lit quality, ripening to a planetary sheen at the periphery of each bough. L.O.G. has done a poor job of disguising his own artifice, leaving stuffing exposed through gaps in fabric hillsides, and cogs whirring in the azure distance. There's a charming sense of childlike make-believe, as clockwork bugs totter over bodged panelling. Not all the levels live up to Nutty Acres, sadly, but Banjoworld is a definite high point, gathering together iconic moments and props from our hero's earlier hits and putting them on display in a vast, theatrical museum. Expect man-sized Subbuteo sets, a witch's grotto and lots of highly localised weather.

If the game comes off well in screenshots, however, it's a bit of a dog in motion. Loading pauses of abysmal extent and frequency do little to endear you to the slightly menu-heavy flow, and the frame-rate occasionally wanders into a swamp and stays there. Given these shortcomings, Rare's sly jab at its own host hardware in the LOGBOX 720 level - a Tron-like vertical labyrinth of diodes and circuitry - feels a little rich: making fun of the Xbox 360's wobbly bits is all very well - interference crackles across the screen when you collide with a chipset - but not when your own performance on said console is so uneven.

The writing also fails to entirely capitalise on its early promise. There are some inspired touches, especially the soap opera parody intro movie for each new world (with the same cast of Banjo Kazooie old-timers popping up to fill different roles), but they rub up against Kazooie's often-laboured "sarcastic banter" and Grunty's annoying rhyming put-downs. Rare's orchestral score - plainly the work of the composers behind Viva Pinata - is a wee bit fruity at times, but that's perhaps a question of personal taste.

The issue which proves most lasting, however, is that while Rare's staggered reward structure caters admirably to the less skilled, with enough presets or shortcuts to keep younger or less patient brains from wandering off, it doesn't do enough to persuade more technically-minded players to get their fingers dirty. The challenges are generally fetch quests or lap races, with the odd "smash-X-enemy" jaunt thrown in for kicks, and while diverting they simply can't sustain the weight of the creative possibilities.

On occasion Rare does manage to nail the balance between these extremes, either by pulling something flagrantly peculiar out of the sack or just putting a bit of spin on convention. An example of the former occurs in the Jiggoseum, with the player trying to take down as many super-sized dominos as possible through any combination of ballistics, momentum and skill. An example of the latter would be an apparently unimaginative escort mission in Nutty Acres. At first we opted for pugnacious tactics, fielding a small, spikey juggernaut with cannons facing in all directions, but far better results were eventually achieved by way of a flying armoured umbrella, dunked down over the target whenever Gruntbots appeared.

Online multiplayer is definitely where it's at, with many of the single player's best tricks benefiting no end from the presence of eight budding inventors per event (or two in offline split-screen), each with his or her own mechanical Frankenstein. What exactly you can bring to the party depends on how far you've advanced in single player of course, but there's a Beginner's mode with some sturdy defaults if you find yourself out of your depth. King-of-the-hill, lap racing and Sumo stand-offs all rear their heads, but our favourites were the more out-of-the-way modes such as aerial football. There's a selection of online leaderboards for stat-busters, and you can pinch your rival's blueprints mid-match.

Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts isn't quite a classic, and N64 patrons may be irked by what they consider Rare's wilful misuse of its back catalogue. For everybody else, it's an unusually well-developed attempt to jump-start a geriatric IP which stumbles only slightly in the process, that knowing charm and bottomless tool box offset by technical hiccups and repetitive design. Given a fair bit of imaginative effort on the player's part, it's a feast. Whatever Rare does next with the bear and the bird, we hope it won't renege on its little genre experiment.

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