It’s a little scary to consider, but did you know that most people who’re dying can tell when it’s coming?
Sometimes it manifests as an implacable sense of doom. For others, it’s a crushing sense of anxiety. In some cases it’s even a sense of calm, and in patients who’re suffering from memory decay there’s usually a moment of clarity before infinite blackness.
I bring this up because I see a lot of parallels between the various recorded reactions to an imminent death and the motivation behind a lot of games that killed or seriously hurt their developer. In place of anxiety or dread however, the prevailing emotion is predominantly overconfidence. A belief that ‘this will be the one’, the game that catapults the developer into (or back into) the spotlight.
I’ve played a lot of those games in the last couple years, not on purpose of course.
What strikes me the most about Nuts & Bolts is that it’s verifiably a game that hurt the developer, bombed and killed the franchise… but there’s no overconfidence on display here. Rather, there’s a crushing sense of resignation. This is not a game made by overconfident, out of touch blowhards who doubled down on a horrible idea and wrote that confidence into their game (like Saints Row 2022).
Before I continue, there’s a myth I have to dispel about this game.
It’s commonly accepted that Nuts & Bolts ditched the old gameplay formula due to Rare being pressured by Microsoft, their new parent company. The story goes that Rare pitched a remake of the first game to Microsoft who dismissed it as ‘unappealing’ and pressured them to make something more marketable. After some brainstorming, they came up with Nuts & Bolts.
It’s not easy to see why people latched onto this: Miicrosoft bought them out a few years prior and this was the first Banjo game released after the purchase. When the game critically bombed, Microsoft reshuffled the company and sent them to the Kinect mines. It’s a story that’s played out 100 times prior to Nuts & Bolts and 1000 times after.
Except it’s a complete falsehood.
Rare wanted to make a Banjo-Kazooie remake after being freed from Viva Pinata and Grabbed by the Ghoulies, but they realized that the audience would’ve either seen it as a rehash or dismissed it due to the then-fading popularity of platformers. Remember, even at the time of release there were a number of critics who viewed the first game as unoriginal, Tooie as well.
Iterating on a concept that began as “Banjo vs. Gruntilda in an event”, Rare added vehicles. From there, one of the co-creators suggested they add a Lego-esque building system. The team were so confident in their decisions that they essentially got as many hands on deck as possible. It may be tempting to assume this was done by a B-team or whatever, but no; pretty much everyone involved with Banjo in the past was working on this game, and despite what some of them have said in recent years, at the time they were in love with what they made.
And almost everyone hated it. The rest is history; Banjo fans felt betrayed, the game sold so poorly that its first month sales were only 10% of Fable 2’s, Rare get sent to the mines until Sea of Thieves, the entire BK IP was just sent to the grave until Smash, blah blah blah.
This might seem like a strange foreword for a review but 1) it’s really important for me to bring this up early rather than later and 2) it’s my demented backloggd introspective on a game I have a complicated relationship with and I get to choose the subject matter.
If you’ve read my Saints Row 2022 review, I noted that despite the crippling backlash that game received, the developers stuck to their guns and the overconfidence is rife in much of the dialogue.
Here, in Nuts & Bolts, that’s decidedly not the case. I don’t actually know if the dialogue was written before the official reveal, but there are a number of lines that boil down to ‘We’re not getting another game. This is going to go poorly, everyone is going to hate it, fuck’. This game was announced in May 2008 and came out in November 2008, it had no chance and this dialogue feels like an admission of it. I so direly wish the writer wasn’t somewhat reclusive, for I’d LOVE to ask them if these lines came before or after the reveal.
This is only some of the dialogue, though.
If you’re just reading this review out of curiosity and have no interest in playing the game here’s a brief summary: Banjo and Kazooie retired, but the Lord of Games found this boring and wanted a competition, so they restored the duo to physical fitness and gave Gruntilda a drone body. Unfortunately they hated the platformer gameplay of the last two games and decided to send the three off to a jumbo-land called Showdown Town to… show down. With vehicles.
Truthfully, understanding the ‘story’ context to Nuts & Bolts isn’t required to read this review, or even enjoy it. Same applies to the actual game. It’s just a little accent for what I’m going to say next.
Much of the dialogue in this game is returning characters admitting how strange their circumstances are but trucking on anyway. While the gameplay is divisive, the writing is unquestionably Rare at their zenith. It’s not entirely to my taste, but it’s undeniably Rare: Exceptionally English, laden with innuendo/double entendre/wordplay, irreverent and completely devoid of a fourth wall.
But what’s really striking about the dialogue is the meta context behind it, again I’m not sure if it’s intentional or not. Yet when characters lament that their next game probably won’t manifest before immediately digging deep into the BK for faithful references or callbacks, it makes me wonder. To me, at least, this was clearly a game written with self awareness - intentional or not.
On top of the dialogue relating to the circumstances of the game itself, there’s also a sizeable amount of lines lamenting the state of the industry. It is fantastically easy to write all of this off as ‘boomer whinging’, but it’s worth considering Rare’s circumstances. Here was a developer mostly known for making children’s games with a bit of naughty humor finding themselves in an industry that suddenly became ashamed of the childish. It wanted more adult, gorey, serious things and if they weren’t getting serious games then they had to ‘adult’ silly. Remember, this game was unveiled alongside Gears of War 2 and Fable 2, essentially both extremes of the spectrum given form. This only got worse with time, I truly don’t believe this game would’ve succeeded at any point of the 360/PS3 gen.
With this in mind, every line of dialogue in Nuts & Bolts paints a very clear picture of a team who realized too late that they were walking into a hell of their own making only to shrug and try their best to continue the series anyway, despite the inevitable.
And… God, them trying to continue the series is really where all the issues stem from, isn’t it?
To switch over to the gameplay track for a while, I really like playing Nuts & Bolts. My game preferences are vast, there’s a lot I can enjoy, but I have a real love for games that give me a bunch of tools and say ‘YOU make the solution, nerd’. It’s why I sank about 150~ hours into Tears of the Kingdom, and why I keep buying immersive sims even though they’ll never be as good as Prey 2017.
Nuts & Bolts is an entire game of that, and I mostly love it. In lieu of areas with ‘collectathons’ as the game calls them, each area is divided up into acts and within each act there are missions. These aren’t what I would call ‘missions’, they’re problems to solve. Like in academia, but fun and you can cheat.
If a character demands you cook an egg, you can simply just deploy a flamethrower as opposed to the ‘intended’ solution of grabbing it and painstakingly dipping it in lava… on the other side of the map. When the game puts you in a race, you can always just mount a few guns on your vehicle and stomp the competition into blocks and paste. Have to defeat enemies? Just attach a sticky ball to them and throw them into the ocean. Even something as simple as ‘Get an object to a point’ gives you a ton of options with no ‘wrong’ way to approach them.
What really accentuates the gameplay are the levels. There aren’t any ‘samey’ levels and each map has its own gimmicks that’re leveraged incredibly well in missions. Parts that I thought were simply set dressing would end up providing, say, scuba diving or tightrope walking or trench racing. There are a lot of surprises and the missions keep up the variety well into the endgame. I’d frequently beeline from my plotted course to go unlock a new map whenever L.O.G dispensed an unlock orb for them, and every time I replay this game I get sad when the map unlocks end.
One mission in particular stands out to me: You’re tasked with bringing coconuts over to a hopper in order to accumulate points. The ‘correct’ approach is to do just that, but… all storage parts are too small to accommodate enough, you’re on a timer, and sticky balls will only pick up 1-3 before getting full.
You can just grab the hopper and bring it to the coconuts, clear the mission with impunity. When I first discovered it I was so in awe of the solution that all I could do was laugh, and thankfully it’s not the only mission with this kind of skip.
The enjoyment isn’t limited to missions either. Showdown Town, the hub, is divided into segments and most of them are inaccessible at the start of the game. As you repeatedly whomp Gruntilda in boss battles, more items are bolted onto the cart you use to traverse the hub and thus more areas are unlocked. With more areas come more items to use in building for missions. It’s a very satisfying loop that, whenever I replay, usually sucks me in wholesale.
Praise must also be offered to the game’s length and pacing: While you are allowed to tackle things in a relatively freeform order after the first few areas, unlocks are tied to Jiggy count and thus progression is uniform even if the means to do it aren’t. More Jiggies means more items and areas, so there’s not really a way to waste time in this game. New stuff comes in at a fairly acceptable pace, though there is a bit of a gap between Banjoland and the Terrarium (the penultimate and final normal areas respectively) where little is ‘happening’ so to speak. It’s fortunately not very long, and soon after the player starts unlocking Super parts which allow for some truly compact, empowered builds.
I’d also feel bad if I got this deep into the review and didn’t mention the presentation. This game came out in 2008 just as gaming was starting to become brown and beige, but it’s vivid in every aspect. Character designs are rife with colour, maps have beautiful palettes that change with each act, and even all of the vehicle parts you can pick up are vibrant. Grant Kirkhope has spoken at length about how much trouble he had with this game’s soundtrack, but the end result was truly fantastic and even 15 years later I still find myself humming the Showdown Town theme.
Lastly, the building itself is intuitive and satisfying. Eschewing more complicated physics systems in favour of arcadey ones means that you can get away with some truly abominable builds, and there’s plenty of room for more expressive and out-there ones. It’s not a difficult system and one hardly needs to understand weight distribution to get a plane off the ground, but understanding airflow and placing propellers correctly will make it go faster. That sort of thing.
If you’re unfamiliar with the game but familiar with its reception, you may be wondering why it’s so divisive. You may even be thinking ‘Mira this sounds great, what’s the deal with it?’ or something to that effect. Unfortunately, this isn’t something I can feign ignorance on. Despite my praise of it, I am keenly aware of why it gets the reception it does.
A very common criticism levelled at N&B’s gameplay is that it’s ‘repetitive’, and this is perhaps one of the most fascinating criticism I’ve ever heard because… In a sense, it’s Schrodinger’s Criticism. It’s simultaneously true and false.
On one hand, it’s true because while the game does offer you a robust building system with lots of parts and thus lots of options, you’re often placed in situations where the convenient cheaty solution ends up being very similar across missions. In most cases, you can get by just fine using either a plane with lots of power behind it (as you’ll go so fast that you won’t need to weigh yourself down with fuel) or a helicopter with a sticky ball and egg gun attached (for carrying and fighting, as helicopters offer so much manoeuvrability compared to anything else that it’s kind of alarming, they just lack in speed).
Land-based vehicles and boats just don’t offer as much versatility. The feeling of repetition comes from these endlessly similar ‘ideal solutions’ as a result; you are at once completely free and utterly pigeonholed.
On the other hand, though, it’s somewhat false. Almost every mission has an intended solution and it very blatantly nudges you in the direction using both the pre-mission cutscene and the description. You’re often told to create, for example, ‘a fast amphibious vehicle with combat functionality’ or ‘a flying vehicle that can attack or defend’, to name two examples.
While the game was designed with variety in mind, it will often tell you the construction required to properly clear a level. This is not a game where you have to play ‘guess the solution’, it’s on display in most levels.
Except… It’s actually significantly harder to go along with what the game tells you to do. This isn’t an exaggeration: You will have an infinitely worse time doing what you’re told for various reasons.
For starters, the opponent AI in races cheats. Surprisingly, not in the traditional way. There’s no rubberbanding. Instead they merely ignore the game’s physics, often making impossible turns and decelerating faster than should be possible. On rough terrain, they’re not beholden to speed or handling penalties. It’s particularly noticeable in the water and one icy mission later in the game, as they completely ignore how the environment should affect their handling and turn corners normally. As a result, it’s just… It’s so much easier to build a flying vehicle and bypass the AI.
Other mission types aren’t exempt from this. While the physics are decent, oftentimes the vehicles you’re expected to make will suffer on terrain that’s unavoidably in between you and your objective. This really rears its ugly head on any mission where you’re suggested to make a ground transport and go over hills or dangerous terrain. Or worse, when the recommended path leads you through mobs that are nonthreatening individually but can quickly mob and destroy your vehicle’s vital parts. By the time you have the parts/armor to just ignore them, the game is almost over.
Or you could just build a flying vehicle.
Lastly… Look, I don’t want to be too outwardly mean because I know a lot of passion went into this project, but a lot of the intended solutions just plain suck.
You want me to partake in a trench race using a ground vehicle? In a game that hates driving on inclines and has awful collision with other races? Haha, no. Plane.
Run the gauntlet through a near-literal minefield while protecting cargo? Haha no, helicopter with ball.
Ascend a coiling staircase using a vehicle with only sails? Haha no, glider.
In every single case, there is no reason to bother engaging with the mechanics. It will only produce a frustrating, tedious and asinine experience that at times feels actively spiteful. Especially in the boss battles, my strategy for which has now evolved to ‘pepper Gruntilda with torpedoes until she quits’. They’re just awfully designed, both from the perspective of an end user and a design perspective. I hope it’s not uncontroversial to say that your missions should incentivize… actually playing them, rather than cheesing them.
And yet, cheesing them is such a monkey’s paw, because it leads to the aforementioned feeling of repetition. When you’re approaching every mission from the air with mostly the same vehicles, the game gets utterly banal. So much so that the Showdown Town segments become inherently enjoyable just by virtue of not being straightforward plane/chopper rides. It’s REALLY not helped by the Terrarium being extremely vertical, all but demanding you approach everything this way.
But honestly? This isn’t even the worst part of the gameplay for me. No, the worst part is the L.O.G’s Choice missions. In lieu of freeform customization, these missions give you a preset vehicle and give you a task.
They suck. Just… God, they’re awful. They showcase everything wrong with this game with a spotlight, underglow and even the addition of sign language and screen readers so you absolutely understand just how bad a lot of the core is when it’s not approached a certain way. If you’re going for a more tangible form of completion rather than 100% (i.e, clear all levels), they’re not optional either. Some acts are almost entirely composed of them.
There’s a reason why, up above, I said I only mostly love the game.
To cap it off, we need to return to the topic of the intended audience.
Just to recap, N&B came out as a children’s game in a market that was rapidly beginning to demand ‘adult’ games, and debuted on a console that had a mostly teenage/adult install base. The prior games were platformers that launched on the N64, ostensibly a more ‘childish’ console.
Several of the staff who worked on this game have said that while it was a misstep, they do view it as an earnest continuation of the series rather than a weird spinoff. This isn’t a bad idea in theory, but… Let’s go back to the dialogue.
Among the sombre acceptance of the game’s fate, puns, dirty jokes, and usual BK writing is a somewhat shocking amount of digs at the old games. While L.O.G’s insults are expected given his character, a lot of other characters poke fun at and seem to outright scorn the previous games. Rare are no strangers to self-deprecating humor but here it feels more like deliberate spite. As if it’s claiming to be a love letter to the old games while kicking them whenever possible. You may view hardcore BK fans who disown the game as irrational and overzealous, but why should they feel any different? The game certainly disowned them.
I honestly do like N&B despite all of its issues, it’s why I’ve been replaying it every few years since release. I even think it has a lot of the BK spirit despite the shift to vehicles, but I can’t in good faith call it a good-willed continuation of N&B. There’s too much regret, spite and weirdness going on in the nitty gritty that make it feel like it came from the myth; as though it were forced out by Microsoft.
But no.
In the same way that you have to consciously choose to engage with this game’s frustrating bits as a way to get the ‘intended experience’, Rare chose this.
Perhaps the Kinect mines weren’t punishment, but penance?
Sometimes it manifests as an implacable sense of doom. For others, it’s a crushing sense of anxiety. In some cases it’s even a sense of calm, and in patients who’re suffering from memory decay there’s usually a moment of clarity before infinite blackness.
I bring this up because I see a lot of parallels between the various recorded reactions to an imminent death and the motivation behind a lot of games that killed or seriously hurt their developer. In place of anxiety or dread however, the prevailing emotion is predominantly overconfidence. A belief that ‘this will be the one’, the game that catapults the developer into (or back into) the spotlight.
I’ve played a lot of those games in the last couple years, not on purpose of course.
What strikes me the most about Nuts & Bolts is that it’s verifiably a game that hurt the developer, bombed and killed the franchise… but there’s no overconfidence on display here. Rather, there’s a crushing sense of resignation. This is not a game made by overconfident, out of touch blowhards who doubled down on a horrible idea and wrote that confidence into their game (like Saints Row 2022).
Before I continue, there’s a myth I have to dispel about this game.
It’s commonly accepted that Nuts & Bolts ditched the old gameplay formula due to Rare being pressured by Microsoft, their new parent company. The story goes that Rare pitched a remake of the first game to Microsoft who dismissed it as ‘unappealing’ and pressured them to make something more marketable. After some brainstorming, they came up with Nuts & Bolts.
It’s not easy to see why people latched onto this: Miicrosoft bought them out a few years prior and this was the first Banjo game released after the purchase. When the game critically bombed, Microsoft reshuffled the company and sent them to the Kinect mines. It’s a story that’s played out 100 times prior to Nuts & Bolts and 1000 times after.
Except it’s a complete falsehood.
Rare wanted to make a Banjo-Kazooie remake after being freed from Viva Pinata and Grabbed by the Ghoulies, but they realized that the audience would’ve either seen it as a rehash or dismissed it due to the then-fading popularity of platformers. Remember, even at the time of release there were a number of critics who viewed the first game as unoriginal, Tooie as well.
Iterating on a concept that began as “Banjo vs. Gruntilda in an event”, Rare added vehicles. From there, one of the co-creators suggested they add a Lego-esque building system. The team were so confident in their decisions that they essentially got as many hands on deck as possible. It may be tempting to assume this was done by a B-team or whatever, but no; pretty much everyone involved with Banjo in the past was working on this game, and despite what some of them have said in recent years, at the time they were in love with what they made.
And almost everyone hated it. The rest is history; Banjo fans felt betrayed, the game sold so poorly that its first month sales were only 10% of Fable 2’s, Rare get sent to the mines until Sea of Thieves, the entire BK IP was just sent to the grave until Smash, blah blah blah.
This might seem like a strange foreword for a review but 1) it’s really important for me to bring this up early rather than later and 2) it’s my demented backloggd introspective on a game I have a complicated relationship with and I get to choose the subject matter.
If you’ve read my Saints Row 2022 review, I noted that despite the crippling backlash that game received, the developers stuck to their guns and the overconfidence is rife in much of the dialogue.
Here, in Nuts & Bolts, that’s decidedly not the case. I don’t actually know if the dialogue was written before the official reveal, but there are a number of lines that boil down to ‘We’re not getting another game. This is going to go poorly, everyone is going to hate it, fuck’. This game was announced in May 2008 and came out in November 2008, it had no chance and this dialogue feels like an admission of it. I so direly wish the writer wasn’t somewhat reclusive, for I’d LOVE to ask them if these lines came before or after the reveal.
This is only some of the dialogue, though.
If you’re just reading this review out of curiosity and have no interest in playing the game here’s a brief summary: Banjo and Kazooie retired, but the Lord of Games found this boring and wanted a competition, so they restored the duo to physical fitness and gave Gruntilda a drone body. Unfortunately they hated the platformer gameplay of the last two games and decided to send the three off to a jumbo-land called Showdown Town to… show down. With vehicles.
Truthfully, understanding the ‘story’ context to Nuts & Bolts isn’t required to read this review, or even enjoy it. Same applies to the actual game. It’s just a little accent for what I’m going to say next.
Much of the dialogue in this game is returning characters admitting how strange their circumstances are but trucking on anyway. While the gameplay is divisive, the writing is unquestionably Rare at their zenith. It’s not entirely to my taste, but it’s undeniably Rare: Exceptionally English, laden with innuendo/double entendre/wordplay, irreverent and completely devoid of a fourth wall.
But what’s really striking about the dialogue is the meta context behind it, again I’m not sure if it’s intentional or not. Yet when characters lament that their next game probably won’t manifest before immediately digging deep into the BK for faithful references or callbacks, it makes me wonder. To me, at least, this was clearly a game written with self awareness - intentional or not.
On top of the dialogue relating to the circumstances of the game itself, there’s also a sizeable amount of lines lamenting the state of the industry. It is fantastically easy to write all of this off as ‘boomer whinging’, but it’s worth considering Rare’s circumstances. Here was a developer mostly known for making children’s games with a bit of naughty humor finding themselves in an industry that suddenly became ashamed of the childish. It wanted more adult, gorey, serious things and if they weren’t getting serious games then they had to ‘adult’ silly. Remember, this game was unveiled alongside Gears of War 2 and Fable 2, essentially both extremes of the spectrum given form. This only got worse with time, I truly don’t believe this game would’ve succeeded at any point of the 360/PS3 gen.
With this in mind, every line of dialogue in Nuts & Bolts paints a very clear picture of a team who realized too late that they were walking into a hell of their own making only to shrug and try their best to continue the series anyway, despite the inevitable.
And… God, them trying to continue the series is really where all the issues stem from, isn’t it?
To switch over to the gameplay track for a while, I really like playing Nuts & Bolts. My game preferences are vast, there’s a lot I can enjoy, but I have a real love for games that give me a bunch of tools and say ‘YOU make the solution, nerd’. It’s why I sank about 150~ hours into Tears of the Kingdom, and why I keep buying immersive sims even though they’ll never be as good as Prey 2017.
Nuts & Bolts is an entire game of that, and I mostly love it. In lieu of areas with ‘collectathons’ as the game calls them, each area is divided up into acts and within each act there are missions. These aren’t what I would call ‘missions’, they’re problems to solve. Like in academia, but fun and you can cheat.
If a character demands you cook an egg, you can simply just deploy a flamethrower as opposed to the ‘intended’ solution of grabbing it and painstakingly dipping it in lava… on the other side of the map. When the game puts you in a race, you can always just mount a few guns on your vehicle and stomp the competition into blocks and paste. Have to defeat enemies? Just attach a sticky ball to them and throw them into the ocean. Even something as simple as ‘Get an object to a point’ gives you a ton of options with no ‘wrong’ way to approach them.
What really accentuates the gameplay are the levels. There aren’t any ‘samey’ levels and each map has its own gimmicks that’re leveraged incredibly well in missions. Parts that I thought were simply set dressing would end up providing, say, scuba diving or tightrope walking or trench racing. There are a lot of surprises and the missions keep up the variety well into the endgame. I’d frequently beeline from my plotted course to go unlock a new map whenever L.O.G dispensed an unlock orb for them, and every time I replay this game I get sad when the map unlocks end.
One mission in particular stands out to me: You’re tasked with bringing coconuts over to a hopper in order to accumulate points. The ‘correct’ approach is to do just that, but… all storage parts are too small to accommodate enough, you’re on a timer, and sticky balls will only pick up 1-3 before getting full.
You can just grab the hopper and bring it to the coconuts, clear the mission with impunity. When I first discovered it I was so in awe of the solution that all I could do was laugh, and thankfully it’s not the only mission with this kind of skip.
The enjoyment isn’t limited to missions either. Showdown Town, the hub, is divided into segments and most of them are inaccessible at the start of the game. As you repeatedly whomp Gruntilda in boss battles, more items are bolted onto the cart you use to traverse the hub and thus more areas are unlocked. With more areas come more items to use in building for missions. It’s a very satisfying loop that, whenever I replay, usually sucks me in wholesale.
Praise must also be offered to the game’s length and pacing: While you are allowed to tackle things in a relatively freeform order after the first few areas, unlocks are tied to Jiggy count and thus progression is uniform even if the means to do it aren’t. More Jiggies means more items and areas, so there’s not really a way to waste time in this game. New stuff comes in at a fairly acceptable pace, though there is a bit of a gap between Banjoland and the Terrarium (the penultimate and final normal areas respectively) where little is ‘happening’ so to speak. It’s fortunately not very long, and soon after the player starts unlocking Super parts which allow for some truly compact, empowered builds.
I’d also feel bad if I got this deep into the review and didn’t mention the presentation. This game came out in 2008 just as gaming was starting to become brown and beige, but it’s vivid in every aspect. Character designs are rife with colour, maps have beautiful palettes that change with each act, and even all of the vehicle parts you can pick up are vibrant. Grant Kirkhope has spoken at length about how much trouble he had with this game’s soundtrack, but the end result was truly fantastic and even 15 years later I still find myself humming the Showdown Town theme.
Lastly, the building itself is intuitive and satisfying. Eschewing more complicated physics systems in favour of arcadey ones means that you can get away with some truly abominable builds, and there’s plenty of room for more expressive and out-there ones. It’s not a difficult system and one hardly needs to understand weight distribution to get a plane off the ground, but understanding airflow and placing propellers correctly will make it go faster. That sort of thing.
If you’re unfamiliar with the game but familiar with its reception, you may be wondering why it’s so divisive. You may even be thinking ‘Mira this sounds great, what’s the deal with it?’ or something to that effect. Unfortunately, this isn’t something I can feign ignorance on. Despite my praise of it, I am keenly aware of why it gets the reception it does.
A very common criticism levelled at N&B’s gameplay is that it’s ‘repetitive’, and this is perhaps one of the most fascinating criticism I’ve ever heard because… In a sense, it’s Schrodinger’s Criticism. It’s simultaneously true and false.
On one hand, it’s true because while the game does offer you a robust building system with lots of parts and thus lots of options, you’re often placed in situations where the convenient cheaty solution ends up being very similar across missions. In most cases, you can get by just fine using either a plane with lots of power behind it (as you’ll go so fast that you won’t need to weigh yourself down with fuel) or a helicopter with a sticky ball and egg gun attached (for carrying and fighting, as helicopters offer so much manoeuvrability compared to anything else that it’s kind of alarming, they just lack in speed).
Land-based vehicles and boats just don’t offer as much versatility. The feeling of repetition comes from these endlessly similar ‘ideal solutions’ as a result; you are at once completely free and utterly pigeonholed.
On the other hand, though, it’s somewhat false. Almost every mission has an intended solution and it very blatantly nudges you in the direction using both the pre-mission cutscene and the description. You’re often told to create, for example, ‘a fast amphibious vehicle with combat functionality’ or ‘a flying vehicle that can attack or defend’, to name two examples.
While the game was designed with variety in mind, it will often tell you the construction required to properly clear a level. This is not a game where you have to play ‘guess the solution’, it’s on display in most levels.
Except… It’s actually significantly harder to go along with what the game tells you to do. This isn’t an exaggeration: You will have an infinitely worse time doing what you’re told for various reasons.
For starters, the opponent AI in races cheats. Surprisingly, not in the traditional way. There’s no rubberbanding. Instead they merely ignore the game’s physics, often making impossible turns and decelerating faster than should be possible. On rough terrain, they’re not beholden to speed or handling penalties. It’s particularly noticeable in the water and one icy mission later in the game, as they completely ignore how the environment should affect their handling and turn corners normally. As a result, it’s just… It’s so much easier to build a flying vehicle and bypass the AI.
Other mission types aren’t exempt from this. While the physics are decent, oftentimes the vehicles you’re expected to make will suffer on terrain that’s unavoidably in between you and your objective. This really rears its ugly head on any mission where you’re suggested to make a ground transport and go over hills or dangerous terrain. Or worse, when the recommended path leads you through mobs that are nonthreatening individually but can quickly mob and destroy your vehicle’s vital parts. By the time you have the parts/armor to just ignore them, the game is almost over.
Or you could just build a flying vehicle.
Lastly… Look, I don’t want to be too outwardly mean because I know a lot of passion went into this project, but a lot of the intended solutions just plain suck.
You want me to partake in a trench race using a ground vehicle? In a game that hates driving on inclines and has awful collision with other races? Haha, no. Plane.
Run the gauntlet through a near-literal minefield while protecting cargo? Haha no, helicopter with ball.
Ascend a coiling staircase using a vehicle with only sails? Haha no, glider.
In every single case, there is no reason to bother engaging with the mechanics. It will only produce a frustrating, tedious and asinine experience that at times feels actively spiteful. Especially in the boss battles, my strategy for which has now evolved to ‘pepper Gruntilda with torpedoes until she quits’. They’re just awfully designed, both from the perspective of an end user and a design perspective. I hope it’s not uncontroversial to say that your missions should incentivize… actually playing them, rather than cheesing them.
And yet, cheesing them is such a monkey’s paw, because it leads to the aforementioned feeling of repetition. When you’re approaching every mission from the air with mostly the same vehicles, the game gets utterly banal. So much so that the Showdown Town segments become inherently enjoyable just by virtue of not being straightforward plane/chopper rides. It’s REALLY not helped by the Terrarium being extremely vertical, all but demanding you approach everything this way.
But honestly? This isn’t even the worst part of the gameplay for me. No, the worst part is the L.O.G’s Choice missions. In lieu of freeform customization, these missions give you a preset vehicle and give you a task.
They suck. Just… God, they’re awful. They showcase everything wrong with this game with a spotlight, underglow and even the addition of sign language and screen readers so you absolutely understand just how bad a lot of the core is when it’s not approached a certain way. If you’re going for a more tangible form of completion rather than 100% (i.e, clear all levels), they’re not optional either. Some acts are almost entirely composed of them.
There’s a reason why, up above, I said I only mostly love the game.
To cap it off, we need to return to the topic of the intended audience.
Just to recap, N&B came out as a children’s game in a market that was rapidly beginning to demand ‘adult’ games, and debuted on a console that had a mostly teenage/adult install base. The prior games were platformers that launched on the N64, ostensibly a more ‘childish’ console.
Several of the staff who worked on this game have said that while it was a misstep, they do view it as an earnest continuation of the series rather than a weird spinoff. This isn’t a bad idea in theory, but… Let’s go back to the dialogue.
Among the sombre acceptance of the game’s fate, puns, dirty jokes, and usual BK writing is a somewhat shocking amount of digs at the old games. While L.O.G’s insults are expected given his character, a lot of other characters poke fun at and seem to outright scorn the previous games. Rare are no strangers to self-deprecating humor but here it feels more like deliberate spite. As if it’s claiming to be a love letter to the old games while kicking them whenever possible. You may view hardcore BK fans who disown the game as irrational and overzealous, but why should they feel any different? The game certainly disowned them.
I honestly do like N&B despite all of its issues, it’s why I’ve been replaying it every few years since release. I even think it has a lot of the BK spirit despite the shift to vehicles, but I can’t in good faith call it a good-willed continuation of N&B. There’s too much regret, spite and weirdness going on in the nitty gritty that make it feel like it came from the myth; as though it were forced out by Microsoft.
But no.
In the same way that you have to consciously choose to engage with this game’s frustrating bits as a way to get the ‘intended experience’, Rare chose this.
Perhaps the Kinect mines weren’t punishment, but penance?
cowboyjosh
4 months ago