Change isn't always a good thing.
When in Banjo-Kazooie did you walk up to a character WoW-style, with a massive glowing arrow pointing at their head, have them tell you to do a race and be rewarded with a jiggy, afterwords acting like it never happened? No, you walked up to someone, talked to them for a bit, and did an entertaining challenge for a jiggy that they'd found, and you got that good feeling inside like you did something that mattered. As well, you didn't just do challenges, the platforming aspect made up a significantly large portion of the game. You had to actually use your depth perception to climb ledges and collect scattered jiggies. There were areas of the level that could be accessed by exploration, not noticing them on the other side of the level. Nuts and Bolts' levels consist of large boxes with lifeless, inanimate things scattered within. If I wanted to play World of Warcraft, I'd play World of Warcraft, driving around staring at your map looking to do repetitive challenges for rewards belongs in WoW. In a Banjo game, it does not.
I can go on and on about why the game is too different for comfort, but the bottom line is that Rare went too far with the change, it feels like a completely different game with Banjo characters and items poorly pasted on, like someone using MS Paint to clear up blemishes on an ugly chick. Rare is not Obama. Their argument is "We've left Banjo idle for 8 years, so we wanted to make something new that new players could enjoy as well as old players". What, is the gaming perfection of the Banjo platformers not entertaining enough? Do Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge [2003] and Banjo-Pilot [2005] not count as worthy additions to the series?
I'd like to quote Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation in saying "To me it all smacks of a problem in the media and that rather than focusing on pleasing a paticular audience designers try to to please as many people as possible and just end up giving a blankly mediocre experience for all. So what exactly am I saying? Well, on't fix what isn't broken I guess, taking a format that's proved a massive success and gluing on extra bits rarely causes the coveted lightning to strike twice". He's correct. Rare tried to open Banjo to the casual market, and in doing so they've alienated a good portion of their fanbase. Those who enjoyed playing Banjo-Kazooie for the fun of it, collecting things, farting eggs from Kazooie's rectum, fighting Grunty, the general feel of it all. Who decided old platforming can't be enjoyed by new gamers? I can have a blast playing Super Mario bros. and I wasn't even alive when it was released.
Oh, and yeah, you don't fight Grunty properly either, but in order to prevent spoiling the game I'm simply going to say that if you weren't fond of the vehicular Grunty challenges, don't get yourself excited for the ending. Grunty serves as the one and only boss for each level (one level she appears twice) and it completely sucks the fun out of fighting her. Each battle consists of you awkwardly bumping into her and trying to destroy her vehicle like a game of bumper cars with a group of drunk jocks. Remember finally getting to Grunty at the end of Kazooie, Tooie and even Grunty's Revenge? Any thrill they may have contained is gone, and it replaces the boss battles as an added negative.
The characters are lacking, with a whopping five new additions to the cast. Yes, this includes characters you meet within worlds (there are none, by the way). Trophy Thomas, Piddles, Pikelet, LoG and uh...that one forgettable one. I can't even remember. Trophy Thomas is a cliche arrogant ass, Piddles is a quiet and unexplored character, Pikelet is in the same boat as Piddles, and LoG is probably the worst character in a video game. Ever. He's an omnipotent, all knowing, all powerful, arrogant character capable of clearing any writers block the writers of the god awful pot may've had like nothing. He constantly breaks the fourth wall, which is understandable in a Banjo game, but he completely ruins it. It's nice to break it every now and then, but Nuts and Bolts points out that it is infact a video game so much it's hard to find yourself immersed in it because you're constantly reminded you're playing a game.
On the up-side the Music is fantastizzlick and the Graphics are bright and colourful, which is refreshing.
Back to the down side. I've gotten over the complete character model redesign, but it adds to the fact that this game is simply uncomfortable to play. Humba is essentially a different character, an 11 year old freckled Kameo. I've been writing this for a while, the bottom line is this game shouldn't have been a Banjo game. The vehicle control sucks, it's short, the challenges are repetitive, it's more of a spinoff, it's inconsistent with the previous games, and each one of the points I've just mentioned could've been explained in an entire paragraph. But there's no need, really. I urge anyone reading this to take a minute to actually compare Nuts and Bolts to Kazooie and Tooie and realize it has nothing to do with them.