Posts tagged ‘Xbox 360 Games’
Xbox 360 – Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Review
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Review
The heyday of collecting oodles of shiny objects across expansive worlds may be gone, but that just means that former platforming heroes will have to evolve with the times. Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts takes the basic structure from the duo’s previous adventures, strips out the oft-mocked collect-a-thon demands, and slaps an intricate vehicle-creation tool on top. The result is a unique twist on a classic formula that doesn’t feel like anything else out there. With a powerful yet wonderfully simple creation tool providing the backbone of your quest, the various tasks spread out across six worlds are novel, engaging, and, most importantly, fun. Despite some control annoyances, Nuts & Bolts is an innovative return for two of gaming’s forgotten stars.
The level progression is very similar to previous games in the series. Each of the worlds is huge, requiring a deft hand and a keen eye to explore everything that it has to offer. Jiggies are also back. These serve as the prize for completing missions and open new worlds to explore. Although this might sound familiar, there is one significant difference: Exploration has been made optional. The forced hunt for shiny goodies–the hallmark of 3D platformers–has been virtually removed in N&B, replaced with a series of easily accessed missions. Musical notes still litter the lands, but collecting these is optional as well. They serve as currency to buy more parts for your vehicles, but given that you earn parts anyway just by playing, you won’t have to search for notes if you’d rather just focus on the action. The clear directive to earn more jiggies keeps the game moving at a brisk pace, letting you ponder what sort of cool vehicle to build rather than trying to figure out what you need to do next.
Seeing as how Banjo is just a slow, unathletic bear this time around, you’ll have to rely on vehicles to complete your tasks. The building tool is the core of N&B, and it not only lets you create whatever bizarre contraptions you can imagine, but it is incredibly easy to work with as well. The only requirement is that everything you build needs a seat for Banjo to sit on. Everything else is up to you. You can create a heavy tank loaded with missiles, a sleek airplane with a magnet for scooping up objects, or a bipedal robot with springs for feet. The ease with which you can construct these vehicles makes it possible to breathe life into whatever idea you can come up with. The workshop lets you quickly snap pieces into place, tweak placement for best effect, and then test out your idea at the track. Within minutes, even the craziest ideas can be realized. Creating can be so fun that it’s possible to lose sight of the missions and just focus on building off-the-wall vehicles that have no relevance in the game world, but are really funny to see in action.
The one downside to this unrestrained customizability is some annoying control quirks. Your vehicles will cruelly conform to real-life physics, so if your weight isn’t spread out properly, you’ll be stuck with a fancy-looking paperweight. This can be avoided with thoughtful construction, but bumpy roads provide a more lasting obstacle. Your vehicle is prone to spin wildly if you hit a hill the wrong way or brush against a pipe jutting out from a wall. Due to this sensitivity, navigating around the environment can be difficult until you come to grips with the handling. With a little practice, you’ll learn when to let off the gas and how to avoid debris without spinning out, making on-the-ground missions fast and exciting, but be prepared to wreck often in the early goings. The air and water vehicles perform much better, letting you gracefully navigate treacherous lagoons or pull off loop-de-loops with nary a hitch. It’s a shame that there aren’t more water sections, because cutting through waves is really a blast.
Land and sea alike look quite impressive in Nuts & Bolts. The worlds are large and inviting, blending bright colors into a cheery tapestry. Nutty Acres is particularly noteworthy in the way it constructs a rich playground in which the grass looks like it was sewn together in the style of a patchwork quilt, the metallic clouds hang from sturdy guy-wires, and the sky is painted onto a wall. Although all of the worlds have their own unique flavor, there is one problem with all this extravagance: The frame rate is sometimes unstable. Most of the time the game moves at a steady clip, but there are brief moments when you will almost be able to count the frames of animation as they slowly peel away. This doesn’t happen often, but it can be frustrating when it hits in the middle of a tight race. Additionally, when you’re buying parts for your vehicles, the game sometimes slows down considerably, turning a simple trip to the store turn into a prolonged ordeal.
Thankfully, the music suffers no such issues, and players will find it delightfully immersive. Though some of the tracks have been pulled from previous games in the franchise, they have been remixed here, providing a strong soundtrack for all of the wacky vehicular fun. Each world has its own unique score, but what’s interesting is how the music subtly changes while you explore. Instruments will drop in and out depending on the situation, molding the tune to your immediate surroundings. Aside from the gibberish speak which remains largely the same as it was 10 years ago, the rest of Nuts and Bolts has been boldly updated.
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is a fantastically fun update to an aging formula. The easy vehicle-creation tool makes even the craziest ideas possible, and the missions let you exert your creative muscle in spectacular fashion. Aside from a few control quirks and frame-rate issues, N&B is a joy from beginning to end, providing a constant string of new parts and objectives to keep you entertained for a long time. If this is the direction that the Banjo franchise is going in, let’s hope it’s not another eight years between games.
Xbox 360 – Tomb Raider Underworld Review
Tomb Raider Underworld Review
When Eidos handed development of the Tomb Raider franchise to Crystal Dynamics, it was a risky but ultimately wise decision. The team managed to reinvent the series while staying true to its roots with Tomb Raider: Legend, while Tomb Raider: Anniversary built on solid foundations to reimagine Lara Croft’s original adventure. Tomb Raider Underworld is Crystal Dynamics’ third game in as many years, and the high work rate is starting to show. Lara may have plenty of new moves at her disposal, but little has been done to address the many camera and clipping issues still present. Tomb Raider Underworld offers an enticing new adventure, but if you’re a fan of the series you’ll find that Lara is starting to show her age.
Tomb Raider Underworld is constructed in an almost identical fashion to its predecessors, with exploration in exotic locations punctuated by occasional combat and vehicle sections. The interaction between Lara and the environments has long been the draw of the series, and performing daring jumps to scale seemingly impossible heights is as satisfying as ever. Lara’s even learned a few new moves in the year since Anniversary, and she can now free-climb, balance along thin beams, and abseil using her rappel line. Crucially, none of these moves complicates Lara’s basic movement, and while you have to adjust your eyes to the many new visual cues showing you where to go, they all add new levels to the simple pleasure of adventuring.
While these new abilities expand Lara’s already-impressive acrobatic skills, there are a lot of gameplay issues that continue to annoy. The world is incredibly rigid, with strict rules on which platforms, objects, and edges can be interacted with and which can’t. The places where Lara can go are well marked out–they feature nice right-angled edges and are usually lighter than the surrounding material to signify your route through. This makes it easier to figure out the correct way to go, but at the same time it means there’s little room for improvisation, and the genre has moved beyond such linear progression. Even worse, Lara will frequently clip into a piece of the scenery and then refuse to come out until you stop, turn around, and run out of it again. Add all this to an incredibly unruly camera, and Tomb Raider Underworld is still just as frustrating as its predecessors.
You won’t come across an abundance of enemies in the game, but the ones that you do encounter are incredibly stupid. Human enemies will stand in front of you as you pummel them with gunfire, while the real-world and mythical beasts wait to emerge from the same spot every time. There’s still no cover system in Tomb Raider, so you’re left to go behind objects, run out to fire, and then repeat until you’ve dealt with the threat. It’s incredibly fiddly when held up to the combat in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, but thankfully there’s an ultra-powerful weapon toward the end of the game that eradicates the need to take cover completely. The whole weapon system is poorly balanced from the start–you choose one firearm at the beginning of each level, but if you check your inventory you’ll find Lara has everything from pistols to an assault rifle into her tiny backpack. Thankfully, the tedious quick-time events have now disappeared completely, while Lara can kick enemies that get too close for comfort.
Tomb Raider Underworld is an enjoyable adventure, but it’s one that’s just too familiar for anyone who’s played the previous games. The basic problems with clipping and the unruly camera are still annoying, and while Lara’s new abilities add to her impressive athleticism, the route through most levels is still rigidly linear. The AI and combat are also weak, and while fighting is a relatively small part of the game, Underworld would arguably be better without it. That said, the environments are stunning, and working your way through the many different challenges is still as enjoyable as ever. Ultimately there’s still life in the Tomb Raider series, but as the title suggests, it may be in need of another resurrection.