He May Have Reloaded But He's Shooting Blanks
Conker: Live and Reloaded is a remake of Conker’s Bad Fur Day originally released in 2001 back on the N64(Nintendo64). After a disapproving shake of my father’s head any hopes of playing Bad Fur Day were dashed, now 2009 and 21 years old I figured I would take it for a spin and my reaction… a disapproving shake of the head.
My biggest problem with Conker is it’s sense of humor, the game is much like Lucas Art’s Armed and Dangerous in the sense that you play the game mainly for the jokes. Only problem is unlike Armed and Dangerous I barely laughed while playing this game. Unless Gregg the Grim Reaper was on screen my typical response to the jokes was to stare blankly at my television wondering if something was suppose to be funny. It reminded me a lot of South Park when every now and then they have me laughing out loud, but majority of the time I feel like an old man out of the loop… and thankful for it. I found most of the gag’s to be just too mean spirited or lewd, yes the movie parodies made me grin but still just not my cup of tea.
Right, now on with the gameplay the real meat of any game, and to it's credit there's lot of variety in this game and frankly most of it is not that bad, but at the same time none of it is all to good either. At it’s heart Conker is a platformer you have your standard jump and double jump to help you avoid enemies and reach your destination, the problem I had with this aspect of the game play is that Conker can not fall from even sub par heights. Jump off a tree stump and the chances are your going to take some damage whether you try to use your tail as a helicopter or not. Another problem I had was when you ran into the occasional grunt, I felt it was just pointless filler. You pull out a a baseball bat and whack it, take two steps back as it shows it’s spikes, wait for the spikes to retract, take two steps forward and again whack it. You’ll go through this routine five times before the enemy finally dies in a explosion of it’s own blood. Also I was surprised by how easy everything was, save a few glitches and the AI controlled characters having trouble following you the game is a cake walk, for a game that’s rated M and even say’s on the front of the box, This game is not for anyone under the age of 17, it seemed awfully simple as if the game was designed for kid’s who snuck behind there disapproving fathers and played it anyway. Again the only bright spot is the variety, you’ll be rolling up ball’s of poo, surfing on lava, shooting Nazi Teddy bears, add in the random context sensitive moments, and your sure at the very least to be surprised even if your not having a terribly fun time with the game.
So if your still reading this you may be asking “If you didn’t like the game so much then why did you play it from beginning to end?” , other than spending 20 bucks the game looks gorgeous. I can honestly say this is one of the few times that I actually played through an entire game pretty much based on the beauty of it’s graphics, quite frankly the look of the game sucks you in and makes you want to explore every nook and cranny of the world and see it’s odd inhabitant’s.
After the 12 hour single player there is a multiplayer aspect to this game and to my surprise there is still a community there even after almost 4 years after it’s original release… or original re-release. All five times I decided to give it a whirl I found somebody to play with, the multiplayer is a classed based third person shooter, Tediz vs. Squirrels. To Rare’s credit it’s alright, all the games were lag free and the number of different classes and their many skills made it fun to explore the different characters and see what exactly they can and can’t do, now is there enough people online that I would recommend you rush out and buy the game based solely on the multiplayer? No, it’s more of a nice bonus to a single player focus game.
In the end this is a hard game to rate, if you get a kick out of the gag’s chances are your really going to like this game, and to be clear the gameplay was not bad but it just didn’t excite or even motivate me to keep playing. So my view is this, Conker Live and Reloaded is a beautiful, mediocre, and not very funny video game.
