I don’t normally write bad reviews because I don’t usually review games in genres I don’t like. I’d just write something like “Street Fighter is a bad game because it’s too hard to pull off special moves. Also the enemy AI is too tough".

But! Banjo-Kazooie (Nuts and Bolts) is the third in the series of platformers by Rare. I like platformers, so I feel qualified to review it. Unfortunately, it’s cemented my feeling that Rare never made a really good game except for Donkey Kong Country. And even DKC is now eclipsed by Yoshi’s Island in much the same way that Sonic is eclipsed by Mario 3/Super Mario World. Good, but simple and more susceptible to ageing.

Nuts & Bolts’ first problem is its biggest. The engine is half-platformer, half vehicle-physics playground. You’re still running around in a platformy world, doing platformy tasks. You’ll have to reach point B from point A, return 10 things to that guy, beat up a bossman and play pretend football on a giant field.

The other half of the engine is a build-your-own vehicle with real vehicle physics. Well, consistent vehicle physics anyway. Vehicles have an uncanny ability to hold things and overall feel a little cartoony to me. They handle pretty well, although some ungainly designs are as impossible to control as they look, so maybe it would be more accurate to say that they handle as well as you’d expect them to. There are a lot of parts to use, but the first levels come with pre-designed suggestions and later you can buy blueprints if you don’t want to mess with the designer. (I didn’t.)

So the basic idea of Nuts & Bolts is to take all the normal platformer things and make you do them in a vehicle that you build yourself.

This is a pretty terrible idea. Let me explain: it’s NOT FUN. At best it’s boring, when it’s too easy. Driving is faster than running, but easy driving isn’t automatically more exciting than easy running. When the game makes things harder, running and jumping would start being fun. Instead, driving is just frustrating; it’s impossible to drive with the precision you have in a normal platformer because you have to brake, back up, turn around, and so on. Whether it’s missing a critical path or a harassing enemy, driving gameplay turns platforming into a muddy mess: inaccurate and slow. The muddiness converts gameplay that would otherwise be at least inoffensive into pure frustration; I started skipping side paths because mistakes were so costly. Then I started running away from enemies—early vehicles don’t have a way to defeat enemies anyway, so I would have had to stop the vehicle, get out, and smash them with my wrench. Oh, and did I mention that all missions are timed? If you don’t finish the level in time, no jiggy for you! Not only are mistakes many times more expensive than a traditional platformer, you get a timer, something even Mario got rid of by 1996**. That’s a recipe for stress, not fun.

Problem two is relatively harmless compared to the driving, but just as baffling. Key progression points are not mentioned or even miscued. For example, once you beat a level in world 2, the corridor world’s map gets a world 3 icon. But can you get there? Ha ha! No! Not unless you beat the boss in world 1, which gives you a set of grippy wheels***. Later, once you’ve beaten a few missions in world 3, gone back to the corridor world and are looking for the jiggie dispenser (see problem 3), you’re stuck! You have to cross a lake with your vehicle to dispense the jiggies so you can take them back to the central jiggie collector. This is where I quit, but I bet I have to go back to world 2 and beat the boss there in order to get floaty wheels. Or whatever.

Problem three is just classic Rare touches, like a super-long tutorial intro, annoying squeaky jibba-jabba, pointlessly convoluted mechanics. OK, maybe some people have a legitimate love for squeaky jibba-jabba (especially when it’s English-accented!), but I can’t even tolerate it when it shows up in Okami, and that’s one of the prettiest games ever (also it’s Japanese-accented).

But the other two are inexcusable. Sure, the first level in any game is usually a tutorial, which is fine, but there’s so much TALKING. In a PLATFORMER. Start the game, listen to a story, move like 10 feet, then read some more instructions which (I guarantee it) you will forget 20 seconds later. Repeat about 4 times, then play a level, then endure at least one more bout of explanation.

The convoluted mechanics are just busy-work. To open a world, you drive to the top of the hill and grab a globe. Then you drive it down to its plinth and drop it off. When you find a box of parts, you have to grab it *then* drive it back to the garage. You finish a mission, *then* leave the world, find the jiggie dispenser, load the dispensed jiggie(s) on your vehicle, and take them to the centre of town to be collected by the central jiggie collector.

So: in summary, if you’re into virtual legos, this game is probably awesome if you never play any of the missions. Especially, flying around was fun. I never figured out how to get a custom vehicle *outside* a mission though—they seem to be restricted to actual platformer gameplay, at least in the early part of the game that I played.

The sad part is that among its platformer compatriots of the late 90s, Rare is the only one with a progressively loosening grasp on what ‘fun’ means. Naughty Dog’s early Crash Bandicoot games were pretty blah, but Jak was great and apparently Uncharted is pure awesome (I’ve not played it). Insomniac was pumping out ‘competent’ for several years until something happened with Ratchet & Clank*. All 3 companies were and still are competent technical artists, but Rare makes good-looking games that aren’t fun.

(I guess if I were a game critic, I’d say the sad part is that the vehicle+platformer experiment didn’t work. But me, I’m mostly just annoyed that Rare has never equalled Donkey Kong Country.)

*Even Mario bounced back from Sunshine. But I didn’t want to mention the Big Name and anyway Mario is made by the Japanese.
**And Mario still has LIVES. But that’s because they can’t imagine getting rid of 1-UP mushrooms.
***I ran into this because my thought process was something like “Well, World 1 was worthless. Let’s see what World 2 is like.” Then, “World 2 was TERRIBLE. Looks like World 3 is open, maybe it’ll be better.” Then I got stuck.