Published on
Sunday, May 17, 2009 by
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Product DescriptionRare Ltd. revives the Banjo-Kazooie franchise with this third installment, created exclusively for the XBOX 360. Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts brings the famous bear and bird duo back in high definition, with plenty of user-generated content and fun gameplay options.
Build a vehicle to pilot over land, water and air at Mumbo’s Motors. View larger. |
The Lord of Games (LOG) has built many worlds to determine the rightful owner of Spiral Mountain. View larger. |
In Nuts & Bolts, a showdown has been set. The Lord of the Games (LOG) has arranged a duel between Banjo and the evil witch Gruntilda, aka Grunty, to decide the rightful owner of Spiral Mountain. LOG, being the creator of all video games, has built a multitude of worlds to host the challenges. Banjo must complete all the worlds to win, while Grunty tirelessly tries to stop his efforts using every method she can muster.
Build it at Mumbo’s Motors
The game is loaded with vehicle options to help Banjo pilot over land, water, and air. Parts for vehicles are widely diverse, ranging from your standard engines and wheels to egg guns, floaters, and other gadgets. The Mumbo’s Motors workshop makes it easy to create new vehicles. You’ll collect different parts by solving puzzles and exploring worlds. Vehicle parts include a wide variety of body panels, engines, wheels, wings, propellers, fuel, and weapons, plus lots of bizarre items like Mumbo Bombos, floaters, and the versatile sticky ball that allows you to create almost anything from a simple object. Once you’ve finished your ride, customize your creation with a paint job and a suitable name before Banjo takes the wheel and pilots it into action.
Customize, Customize, Customize–or Just Get Down to Business
LOG’s worlds are littered with hidden secrets, reward puzzles, and over 100 contraption parts that deliver an almost limitless combination of vehicle possibilities. As you work through the worlds, you’ll discover more and more ways to customize and improve your contraptions, creating a surprising level of user-generated content. But even if you don’t fancy yourself the greatest inventor or a highly creative craftsman, you can still have countless hours of fun with Banjo-Kazooie’s pre-built vehicles. With these at your fingertips you’re ready to jump in and get started, and there are plenty more contraptions available for purchase throughout the adventure using in-game currency and musical notes.
Characters, Old and New
Banjo and his best friend, Kazooie, are ready to battle for their homeland and prevent Grunty from developing it into tower blocks and malls. Other familiar faces return as well, such as Bottles, Captain Blubber, and the Jinjos, along with a vibrant cast and crew of new friends and foes. Keep your eyes peeled for Grunty’s minions–look out for Trophy Thomas, Piddles, and Grunty’s menacing Gruntbots: they’ll do anything to prevent Banjo’s success.
Nuts & Bolts offers an engaging storyline, entertaining characters, and fun gameplay options. This game offers complete single-player and multiplayer experiences–tackle LOG’s worlds on your own, or play with your friends in competitive and cooperative challenges. Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts for XBOX 360 is a enjoyable, challenging game that appeals to people of all ages and types.
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts delivers loads of customization options, interesting characters (old and new), and plenty of fun, challenging gameplay.
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Know about the issues with this game
We purchased the Banjo Kazooie game but have not been able to play it. We have a 37″ TV but the text in the game is impossible to see. For some reason, the manufacturer seems to think everyone has a giant screen TV to play Xbox.
There is one redeeming fact. IF – and everyone may not have this option – you have Xbox Live, you can get a free downloaded update to fix this problem. But what if you don’t have Xbox live – I guess you are stuck with an unplayable game.
Luckily, we have Xbox Live so we will be downloading the fix and trying to play the game. I was not happy with the whole vehicle theme to begin with and this text problem makes it impossible to recommend.
Banjo- Kazooie, Nuts and Bolts
Great product, my kids really enjoy this game. We rented it at Blockbuster then the kids wanted to buy. Amazon.com had the best price, and it came in a reasonable amount of time.
Thanks, but no F%&!! thanks
have a nice day
I’ve waited 10 years for this? No, this I suppose leans more towards Diddy Kong racing…except I want to rip my hair out every time I play it. It’s nothing like the original BKs, sadly, except Showdown Town, which can be pretty entertaining at times. The game has extraordinarily beautiful graphics, but they are but a waste of game play that forces you through timed trials for every single jiggy, which I can not bare. The vehicles are extremely difficult to control, forcing you to hate Banjo Kazooie, which I don’t want to, but like I said, am forced to do after playing this game. Such a shame too. I recently downloaded L.O.G.’s lost challenges, hoping for some reconciliation; almost like paying for college. You pay so much money to do 15 page reports and hope you get a -B.
The challenges are nearly impossible because the control you have over the vehicles is terrible, and the stupid enemies known as “gruntbots” almost whisper, “rip your #&@*!#& hair out, I’m a cheap way of making this impossible to complete.” I’ll once again state how amazing the graphics and visuals are for this game; and like I said, it has its moments. But over all, the game is extremely frustrating to those familiar with the series, and probably those new to it.
I can only hope Rare comes out with another “real” Banjo-Kazooie game. I’d rather play the game boy banjo-kazooie than play this $*%!.
I could go on for days about Stop N’ Swap, but that would be pointless. Microsoft clearly integrated stop n’ swap cheaply throughout the HD remakes of BK1 and BK2 (which I thought was the only good thing to come of BK Nuts and Bolts) by giving you a theme and some gamer pics, and otherwise trying to get you to invest in Nuts and Bolts, hoping that your dreams of stop n’ swap would pay off.
With the graphics, the potential was there, but apparently, an idiot working for Rare suggested the idea that the game be all about racing and timed missions; like I said: idiot.
The controls are very difficult, every mission is timed, and in the end, it doesn’t pay off with stop n’ swap. Buy the arcade versions of Bk1 and Bk2. Don’t waste your hard earned dollar on Nuts and Bolts. Luckily, I only spent $30 on Nuts and Bolts, but the time I wasted on it is time I can never get back.
Vehicular challenges make for a unique gaming experience
I’ll admit, I wasn’t very excited about this game when I heard about it. An N64 platformer, made into a…vehicular platformer? And yet, that’s exactly what this game is. And while it sounds crazy, that is the key to its success. This game turns you loose with some parts and encourages you to experiment. This free-form experimentation is what makes this game so fun.
The first thing that one notices about this game is its sense of humor. It doesn’t take anything seriously, including itself. The characters tend to be pretty funny, although after a while some can start to get a little annoying. The actual on-foot exploration and platforming feels dated and slow. Fortunately, this game doesn’t involve much in the way of traditional platforming. Why walk somewhere when you can fly, drive, or bounce your way there?
The key feature of Nuts and Bolts is the vehicle creation tool. Simple to understand but surprisingly deep, it allows you to create virtually anything you want. The only caveat is that you need to explore the hub town to find many of the good parts that will let you build more exotic things like planes and helicopters. At the beginning of the game it was a little frustrating to find that I couldn’t build these more advanced vehicles, but I quickly found “parts crates” and was able to keep building. And at this point, building vehicles is what keeps me coming back to the game.
The story is mildly entertaining, and serves as the catalyst for inspiring you to build, but after I got halfway through the game I found myself caring less and less about the challenges I was supposed to be winning, and more about just building anything I could dream up. While the creation system is surprisingly thorough, it isn’t perfect. Physics definitely come into play when driving the various vehicles you create, and I often found myself wishing it was easier to make vehicles symmetrical. That said, the creation tool surpassed my expectations and is the highlight of the game. (As a side note, the most important thing this game has taught me is that jet engines make everything better.)
I had to dock this game down to four stars because, well, when comparing the actual competitions you must complete to advance the story to simply building things at random, I greatly favor the latter. To be quite honest, I haven’t finished the game. I got as far as I needed to unlock most of the parts (all the ones I wanted), and haven’t done a challenge since. While I’m sure that I’ll eventually finish it, to earn five stars the story needed to have kept my attention.
This game does have online multiplayer, but I haven’t tried it. From what I’ve read on fan forums, the online community is fairly small and not very active. Recently Rare released “L.O.G.’s Lost Challenges”, which includes some additional missions and multiplayer modes. I haven’t bought it, but it might liven the community up a little. I have played some local multiplayer with my brother, but haven’t experimented enough with it to create my own customized vehicles for use in the various challenges. There are a lot of different multiplayer modes, with most being variations on sports, obviously played with vehicles. The multiplayer aspect didn’t impress me very much and I haven’t played it since.
BOTTOM LINE
This is a fun, thinking-person’s game. Designing vehicles and testing them out in the included test track is more entertaining that one would think, and building effective vehicles requires some forethought and insight into basic physics. If you’re a fan of Banjo and Kazooie, or like sandbox-style vehicle invention, this game is definitely worth a try, though it’s not necessarily a must-buy title.
Banjo-Kazooie
The game is beautiful and, for the most part, enjoyable. Ultimately the game play mechanics are very “last gen”, making it feel older and less intuitive than I would have hoped.