Soulless Cashgrab

Edit: Having a look at this one more time it actually isn't as soulless as I initially thought. There's a lot of cool new things in here, with a cool variety of zombies, plants and game mechanics. Unfortunately the game can still feel very grindy and repetitive at times, it no longer gives you a new thing at the end of every level so the progression is a lot slower which is a big killer. The biggest problem however is that all the passion put into it is ruined by all of the predatory mobile game mechanics we are very familiar with by now.

Villagers in this are the most robotic they've ever been. It's hard for me to feel like I'm in a cozy town with all these characters when they run out of dialogue in less than a week of playing. You can't really build a relationship with them, it doesn't matter if you're the meanest or the nicest person as soon as you leave the screen they will forget everything that happened. In practice there's only 6 different possible villagers since every other villager with the same personality type is just a different texture. A lot of the events in the game you can't even engage on them and just stand there watching, and the ones you can participate are usually annoying (Halloween being a prime example).

While trying to add as many things as possible into the game they forgot to actually make it fun. I really like the first Banjo-Kazooie and I would consider it one of (if not) my favorite 3D platformer of all time, this one however, feels like the complete opposite of the first game. In the original, you could play the levels at your own speed, more than 95% of the Jiggies were obtainable as soon as you went into the level, in this one there's a lot of backtracking and boring walking, instead of making creative puzzles the game just makes puzzles that are obvious but you need a specific skill you only get 5 levels after, not only do you have to go back and forth between levels all the time, you also waste your time thinking there's a creative and cool solution to something that is just "use skill nº 12 here". The levels are gigantic but feel really empty at the same time, the original had shorter levels but they were packed with detail and love on every corner, in this one you'll be spending most of your time traversing giant empty paths with nothing to do. The notes and eggs aren't even scattered anymore, having them be neatly placed around the levels, not only made them look better and but also gave you subtle hints on where to go and explore. If the long walks inside the levels and outside the levels weren't enough, the game also has an insane amount of long cutscenes for everything you do, even with multiple teleporters it feels extremely slow and tedious. It's impressive how many mechanics there are in the game, and how big it looks compared to the first one, but the gameplay is so boring and underwhelming that I couldn't even bring myself to finish it. Not as important but also worth noting the music isn't nearly as good in this one as it was in the first game.