Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Preview

With new components you'll be able to build choppers and all sorts of other cool stuff.

For example, the first task you're set in Nutty Acres is a straightforward race across a hill-strewn landscape: Klungo the farmhand has seen smoke on the horizon and is worried that Mumbo's farm is burning down, so he wants you to go investigate. Our basic buggy struggled with the bumpy terrain, earning us a middle-range time, but with a propeller and some wings we could have flown straight there. Or perhaps we could have found a way to build something round that could roll down the hills and gather speed, using the terrain to its advantage.

This early task is a simple A-to-B race but later in the game we're promised all sorts of challenges, from long jumps to collection tasks to all-out battles. Of course, there'd be little appeal in playing these trials if the actual vehicles weren't fun to build and play with, but happily this appears to be something that Rare have absolutely nailed. The handling of vehicles is based upon the game's internal physics engine and takes a bit of getting used to - the Showdown Town Shopping Cart steers just like a real-world trolley, for example - but the flip side of this is that every component has a profound effect: if you change the design of a bike, maybe switch from four wheels to three, then that will seriously change the way it handles. In time, we reckon you'll learn how to tailor rides to your preferred driving style - and that could be seriously satisfying.

The actual building of your mechanical creations is very intuitive - thanks in no small part to the use of an invisible grid, which helps to keep parts in line with each other. There's no obligation to build in a linear fashion, either: you can leave elements hanging in space and then connect them later on - so you might start constructing your helicopter by deciding exactly where the propellers will go, then build the bits in-between afterwards. A simple colour coding system gives each part an outline - green, amber or red - to indicate whether it can sit in its current location or not. The "grid" itself is 19 blocks wide in every direction, giving plenty of room to work with, and while there will be some limits placed on some of the 102 components, we fully believe there will be enough kit available to build anything you can think of - once you've got all the parts, of course.

It's a good thing that messing around in the vehicles is so much fun, because you'll be spending about 80 per cent of your time driving things. You do always have the option of getting Banjo to move around on foot, but holding down Y will always return you to your cockpit (unless you're in a task). Most of the old moves and abilities are now gone, but you do have the ability to move objects around using your magic spanner - holding down the right trigger will cause you to lock onto and pick up the nearest movable object, which can then be repositioned to your liking. Much of Banjo's scenery items exist as free, independent entities: in other words, if you smack into something, it'll fall over. We accidentally demolished half of Mumbo's farm during our first driving experiments, sending a water tower crashing to the floor. It's another minor detail that greatly adds to the overall fun of the game.

Grunty is back - and she's got a new body. She looks a bit like an evil smoothie-maker, don't you think?

Aside from the single-player hijinx, you'll also get to create some vehicular chaos in a range of multiplayer games over Xbox LIVE. This side of Nuts & Bolts was a bit unstable when we tried it out - but we still got a good sense of what the final experience will be like. Aside from the obvious-they-would-include-this racing modes, we also got to try our hand at football (total anarchy), another game that required you to score points by remaining under a giant floating crown and an utterly brilliant mode entitled Sumo. Here the aim was to keep your car on a raised, circular platform while forcing off your opponents with a spring-based projectile and masses of brute force. As we sent another rival flying over the edge, we were reminded of an old, semi-rubbish TV show called Robot Wars. The wedge-shaped machines may have caused us to recall this memory, but there are other similarities too: after all, both game and show are essentially about building something that will out-perform your opponents. As mentioned in Wez's previous preview, you'll be able to steal the designs of rival vehicles by taking pictures of them with your in-game camera - so online play may prove to be an important way to boost your own engineering skills.

All in all, it looks like there will be a huge amount to do in Nuts & Bolts. While it's understandable that some die-hard Banjo-heads might complain about the relative lack of "proper" platforming, we think that the direction that Rare has chosen to pursue is a genuinely exciting one. It's certainly unusual that so many developers have gone down the user-generated content route at the same time - from Spore to this to the forthcoming LittleBigPlanet - but when the games themselves are of such high quality, who's complaining?

Banjo-Kazooie is due out exclusively for Xbox 360 this November.