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Licensed to Drive

Jeff gets his hands on the new Banjo-Kazooie game and adds propellers wherever possible.

People have been speculating about what a third Banjo-Kazooie game would look like, and some of the guesses got pretty wild. But I don’t think anyone was quite expecting this. Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts seems like it’ll have plenty of actual, honest-to-goodness on-foot platforming in it, but the series is going in a pretty different direction with the addition of vehicles.

Obviously, adding vehicles to a game is rarely enough to make things feel totally different–video game characters have been hitching a ride for years now. But Nuts & Bolts is sort of crazy, because it lets you build your own vehicles, and you’ll often use these to complete the challenges that stand in your way.

When playing for myself, messing around with the vehicle builder was my first order of business. You can pick a pre-fabricated ride or start from scratch, and you can save your creations, as well. You’ll use various blocks to piece together a body, slap on some seats, and probably some wheels, if you want it to roll. Or you could always snap on some propellors up top for a chopper. Maybe add some wings and a jet engine for a plane? Or, hey, plop those props onto the rear of the craft for some water-based propulsion! While there’s a whole game in Nuts & Bolts, I got the impression that snapping together the different parts to make weird cars, boats, subs, planes, and choppers–or some unholy combination of them all–was something I could lose some serious time with. Beyond building a body and making it move, you can also slap on some weapons, or other objects, like a spring, which you can slot on the bottom to make your car jump, or balloons for floatation assistance.

Some multiplayer modes will be all about the vehicles. I caught a quick glimpse of a sumo mode, where players use their contraptions to force each other out of the arena. It’ll support up to eight players. In the single-player, though, it’s all about getting jiggy. Jiggies. Remember those? Yeah, jigsaw puzzle pieces, the objects that make the world of Banjo-Kazooie go ’round are very present here. There will be five worlds to visit as you quest for puzzle pieces and prepare yourself to stop Gruntilda, still the series’ heavy after all these years in a story that involves someone known as The Lord of the Games, who claims to have created every video game ever made… even Target: Terror? Wow.

We saw one single-player task, where you’re challenged to collect 15 coconuts in a vacuum-equipped barrel. It seemed like the right way to do things was to take a vehicle, drive it down to the coconuts, fill it up, and drive it back, making as many trips as needed to get the required amount. But another nearby vehicle could fly, and it also had a sort of sticky ball on it you could use to pick things up–including the barrel you’re supposed to be filling. The Rare representative conducting the demo grabbed the barrel, flew it down near the coconuts, and completed the task with ease. It’ll be interesting to see how many of the tasks change depending on what you’re using to do the job.

Another interesting thing is that you’ll find additional car parts in crates around the world. At any point, you can freeze the action and go into a workshop mode that lets you pick up these new objects and bolt them onto your vehicle. All this vehicle stuff seems like it could be totally awesome.

While we did see some on-foot stuff, and it’s clear that Banjo and Kazooie will have plenty of platforming moves at their disposal, it seems pretty obvious that the vehicle creation stuff will be the heart of the game. Microsoft is pegging this as a holiday release, which in my mind means “November.”

As a footnote, I just got a text message from one Ryan Davis, who claims “Banjo is effin sick.” He then went on to curse for reals, so I think you can safely say that we’re both pretty impressed with it.
Jeff Gerstmann on Google+