Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

Risky it may have been, but it looks great. Visuals are one area where Banjo isn't going to court any controversy - it's a near-perfect update of the charming N64 original to the power of the Xbox 360 hardware, wisely spending its graphics budget on stunning draw distances and lovely textures while allowing its characters and worlds to remain stylised and simple.

No, the controversy, as hinted, is going to come not from the visuals, or the progression - it's going to come from the fact that Banjo doesn't walk anywhere any more. Every mission in the game is accomplished by choosing a vehicle (or constructing your own) to complete the objectives. Even navigation around Showdown Town is vehicular. Your default "shopping cart" vehicle is gradually upgraded, giving you access to more of the city - high grip tyres let you climb steep hills, floats allow you to cross water, and so forth.

The basic pattern of the game, then, is as follows. You enter a game world, and drive around to find the challenges (they're helpfully marked on your map). You accept the challenge, and are promptly given a screen where you can pick a pre-made vehicle or, in the majority of quests which allow it, build your own vehicle (or pick from one you built previously).

The system for building vehicles is very flexible and quite good fun. Just about anything you build will work, in some sense - put a seat, some fuel, an engine and a drive mechanism (wheels, propellers, rotors, rockets...) in there, and it'll move. They don't even need to be next to one another - pop them in any position in the vehicle and they'll work. All you need to ensure is that the parts of your creation physically connect, so they don't fall off instantly.

You also get a pretty large canvas to play with - a cubic grid of 19x19x19, with a maximum of 250-odd parts in each vehicle. Most things you build will be much, much smaller, but it's nice to know that the potential for really weird, huge stuff exists for those who wish to exploit it.

The question - and it's one we don't have an answer to yet, so this really isn't a judgement on the game - is whether this LEGO-style construction is going to engage players in the long-term. The missions themselves, for all that Rare has worked to introduce variety, mostly seem to boil down to racing (either against opponents or against the clock) or vehicular brawling (vehicles can have weapons, and ramming isn't a terrible tactic either). Much of the variety is going to have to come from vehicle options - although since there are probably billions upon billions of possible vehicles to build, that's an admittedly healthy dollop of potential variety.

Given the freedom to create your own vehicles, it's little surprise that handling is left up to physics - albeit tweaked physics which focuses on fun over realism. One concern is that compared to the precise handling of a character in a platform game, or even the heavy handling of a "realistic" driving game, Banjo's creations tend to feel light - and flip over at the slightest provocation, causing some tooth-grinding in the process. This may be because we were playing with early vehicles, rather than an endemic problem - only light vehicle components are available at the outset.

It's hard to deny a slight twinge of disappointment at Banjo's abandonment of its platforming roots, but this is a somewhat unfair sentiment. Nuts & Bolts, having set out to do something dramatically different, deserves to be judged not on what it could have been as a platformer - but on what it actually turns out to be as a mission-focused vehicle construction game.

As it stands we're absolutely certain that the idea itself works. Construction is easy, fun and flexible, the mission structure and progression is in place, it looks amazing, and it's even got some quite fun (if rather hectic) multiplayer game modes in there. It may not be the game we expected it to be, but if building and racing vehicles around Banjo's worlds has enough depth to hold interest, it could still turn out to be a game we learn to love.