With 2024 being a very slow year for new releases, I have spent a lot of the last few months checking off games from my backlog. Recently, I’ve been focused on Rare games, namely GoldenEye 007, and I plan on playing Perfect Dark for the first time later this year. My latest adventure into games I’ve been meaning to finish is 2008’s Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.
As a big fan of the original Banjo-Kazooie game since the N64 days, I am one of the many platformer fans who have been patiently waiting for Banjo-Threeie. Banjo-Tooie isn’t on the same level as the original, but it is still a great time, and I even have a fond spot for the GameBoy Advance game Grunty’s Revenge.
In the past, I’ve tried to give Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts a try, but I could never get far into it. I’m not the type to enjoy building mechanics in most games, especially when it comes to vehicles. In the last week, though, I finally gave myself the mission of finishing it. I went through and got all 131 Jiggies in the campaign, and I can honestly say that Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is one of the most frustrating games I have ever played.
Maybe fine on its own, but not a good Banjo game
To be upfront, I’m not going into this article trying to tell you that Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is one of the worst games I’ve ever played. On it’s own, it’s fine. Not bad, not great. Just. Fine. However, looking at it as a fan of the other Banjo-Kazooie games, this is a bad direction to take the series in. I know it’s a common criticism, but this game is very ugly. Character models look so blocky that Banjo and Kazooie look much worse than they did on the N64. Instead of bringing these beloved personalities back in a way that shows their charm, like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate did, they look like cheap impostors.
It’s not just the looks that make Nuts & Bolts feel out of place. While the series’ past has been in platforming, that gets thrown in the trunk for a focus on creating vehicles and using them to complete challenges. The problem is the physics do not work.
The littlest nudge will spin you out, some collisions will send you flying through the air, and more often than not, the vehicles that the game forces you to use are just god awful. Even when put in a tank-like vehicle, it feels like it is made of cardboard and gets thrown around easily or pushed aside.
After The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom last year, some say that Nuts & Bolts was ahead of its time. Maybe in the concept of using building vehicles to complete your objectives and the freedom you have in some of those challenges to beat them, but Banjo has a lot less going for him than Link. Where the newer game has a gigantic Hyrule to adventure around and good combat, Banjo has much smaller and not as good areas. Tears of the Kingdom has the advantage that the world wasn’t made just for the vehicles. Even if that’s a thing you don’t like, you can find other ways to enjoy the game. For Nuts & Bolts, if you don’t like the way the cars feel, there’s nothing else for you to do. On-foot platforming is almost completely non-existent in this game, and all Kazooie is here for is to hold a wrench and be sassy in dialogue. Most of the time, the wrench, which is used to pick up objects, often wouldn’t grab the right things for me, causing me to constantly have to drop stuff and try again if I was in a hurry.
Get me away from Showdown Town
In the other Banjo-Kazooie games, I, for the most part, like the maps. Nuts & Bolts, on the other hand, is something I never want to see again. Showdown Town, the hub world, quickly became a place I would wage war on if I could.
After completing challenges and earning Jiggies, they don’t actually count towards your overall number. When you return to Showdown Town, you must reclaim your Jiggies and then drive them to the center of the market for them to be banked away and unlock new levels and parts. Fine, whatever, you might be thinking. That sounds like a little more work, but nothing too bad. Those were my early thoughts, too. Then, the police start getting involved. For whatever reason, Showdown Town in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts has a simplified wanted system. If you hit a cop car, they will chase you down. If you are seen helping a Jinjo, they will try to beat you down. If you are seen carrying a Jiggie, that is considered smuggling, and they will do all they can to ram into your little tray vehicle, easily throwing them all over the place.
It took me 16 and a half hours to beat Nuts & Bolts, and as you continue through the game, the cops get more weapons. The earlier cars are easy to destroy, but it’s the fact that they will just come out of nowhere and start blazing those sirens and ramming into you. It’s not even hard to deal with. It’s a little speed bump, but after a few minutes, you can cash in your five or so Jiggies and be on your way. The way it happened every single time I returned to the hub weighed on me, though. I just wanted to be done, but the game was going out of its way to make the experience more cumbersome. You’re already forced to drive a very slow vehicle through Showdown Town. You can make the fastest blueprint and switch to it every time you enter one of the levels, but you’re stuck with one pathetic vehicle in the hub.
Overall, the levels are just not fun to be in. Nutty Acres goes for this weird thing where it’s a farm, but everything is cloth that is stitched together. Banjoland is a museum exhibit filled with displays of things taken from the better games, which is really cool, but it’s all haphazardly thrown together and has some of the most unpleasing music. Jiggoseum is just a boring, wide-open sporting arena. Logbox 720 is a crowded mess. Then you have the absolute worst map of them all: Terrarium of Terror. This is the last world you unlock before the final showdown in Spiral Hill and I cannot explain how much I loathed playing through this area. It’s a few biomes that are sectioned off in space. However, everything is so packed together and on different levels from each other that getting anywhere is a huge chore. I was constantly getting lost, and the races through these tight tunnels were the worst. It wasn’t a matter of “if” I would spin out in the race; it was “when this happens, can I recover in time?”
There are so many aspects of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts that got on my nerves. The slippery controls, the broken physics, and the time you spend in the garage building new vehicles are just not enjoyable to me at all. I played through and beat this game because I love the other games. I figured there had to be something here that would appeal to me. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much. The game is very easy to break and glitch to your advantage, but if that’s all there is that you actually enjoy, was it worth it?
I can’t see myself ever playing through Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts again. I still hope that one day we get Banjo-Threeie or even just a remake of the original game. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate showed that if you show the bear and bird respect towards their origins, they can be something that makes a lot of people happy. Nuts & Bolts is the perfect example of how you disrespect a beloved franchise and its fans.
