If you hate banjo-kazooie, you'll hate this. If you like banjo-kazooie, you'll hate this. Who was this made for again?
Gameplay style change: This is the obvious one, the one that outraged the most gamers. Now repetition in video games is never good... and innovation is always welcomed. That being said however innovation does not mean taking 90% of your original gameplay and tossing it into the trash... innovation means taking an already good formula and adding things to it to make it better. Granted some other series have made complete shifts in style and have succeeded at drawing new gamers in all the while keeping long time fans still interested. Games such as Mortal Kombat who went from fighting game to action adventure in Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks, another example is Jak and Daxter which started out mainly as a platformer to develop into a third person shooter with still an emphasis on platforming but never the less a shooter. However both these games kept core elements from their original concept, Mortal Kombat kept fighting, fatalities, blood, and added on top of it boss fights, puzzles, exploration and adventure. In a similar way Jak II kept some platforming but added shooting to its core gameplay. Nuts and bolts however kept nothing from the originals three Banjos, sure you can still explore on foot, but you don't have any special abilities, you have a single jump, and the worlds have become too vast to explore on foot. Collecting Jiggies in the first three games was liberated, you could pick all of them at the same time, without have to do them as separate missions. The worlds were smaller yes, but it didn't feel limited because we had the freedom to take all the Jiggies in one go - assuming we had all the required abilities. In nuts and bolts not only do you have to talk to certain characters to activates each Jiggy even as missions, but you can't even have access to all the mission choices from the get go... the different sub worlds; are separated into small sections that you have to open using Jiggies.... granted they kept the Jiggies' main function, but it all feels like useless padding in the end. The fact that every mission involves vehicles just feels like an insult. In the 1st mission where you have to use a plane, Bottles tells you that it's hard, that you will need training etc... To which Kazooie replies: hey worm breath I used to be able to fly with wings before, it won't be any problem. I, the gamer, thought it didn't make sense to give Banjo and Kazooie a plane when Kazooie could fly in the 1st place, and that was already bad enough for my enjoyment, but when Kazooie herself realises that she's pretty capable of flying on her own and that she doesn't need a plane, it jumps from being an insult to being a flat out moronic. But this isn't yet the worse in all those changes, if Rare had planned from the start to make a new game with a new style of gameplay which involved Banjo Kazooie, that was presented as a side game in the banjo universe, and not as a main entry in the series; I maybe would have accepted it. Now I hear people saying, Rare announced early before release that the game would be vehicles oriented. I do agree, but I still think that it wasn't their plan from the start. If it was, why would they have portrayed banjo using Kazooie as a lockpick and a chainsaw in the debut trailer? I don't know whether it was Rare's doing or Microsoft's doing; but either way, the whole change of gameplay to me didn't cut it, and as much as I loved Rareware as a child, this game completely destroyed what Banjo stood for, and what I thought of Rareware....