Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is perhaps the boldest and, at the same time, most divisive return of the classic franchise on Xbox 360. After a long hiatus, Rare brought the bear and bird back, but instead of the classic item-collecting in intricate worlds, it built the game around vehicle construction. The player is given parts, a workshop, and a set of tasks that require hauling cargo, outracing a rival, retrieving an item from a height, or blowing something up, and it's entirely up to them whether they build a clunky truck, a plane, a hovercraft, or some bizarre hybrid of it all. Classic note collecting hasn't disappeared, it has simply shifted into the role of fuel that unlocks further levels and parts.

The construction editor is a surprisingly deep system. It matters how weight is distributed, how many wheels you use, how powerful the engine is, and where you place the seat and fuel, and the game happily tolerates even completely nonsensical constructions as long as they work. Built machines could be saved and compared against other players' creations in competitive and cooperative modes, which made the workshop the main reason to keep coming back. The worlds are designed as open playgrounds with dozens of missions, centered on the hub Showdown Town, through which you move with a grappling hook while gradually unlocking shortcuts. The humor stays typically Rare, full of self-irony about the fact that a classic platformer turned into something quite different, and visually it's one of the most colorful and inviting games on the console.

Contemporary reception was divided. Reviews praised the technical execution, physics, and inventiveness, but part of the fan base refused to accept that the platformer had turned into a construction game, and sales reflected that. With time, the view has improved considerably: Nuts & Bolts now reads as a herald of a later wave of games where players build their own machines and look for creative solutions to given problems. Anyone able to set aside the expectations attached to the name will find an unusually inventive toy packed with an enormous amount of content.