Banjo-Tooie Review
See my Banjo-Kazooie review here
DISCLAIMER: I’ll start this review with the same disclaimer I gave last time. I enjoy retro games, but this is not a review from the reference of the release date. Meaning that I will mostly be looking at this game as it stands today since I don’t have the context from release (I never owned an N64). That said, I’m not going to bash it for being old constantly or make points about graphics and such.
Intro
I’ll start by saying that this is obviously another legendary game that is a followup to the original which I enjoyed a lot. It says a lot that these titles are still pretty enjoyable after turning 23 years old. However, I want to use this review not to be harsh to this game but to highlight the obvious and hidden progress games have had since its release.
What is this?
This is a puzzle platformer collect-a-thon game with pretty good characters, expansive level design, graphics that still hold up, and some of the best music you’ll ever hear. Tooie is mostly an expansion and extension of the ideas found in Banjo-Kazooie. The same characters appear and what exists in the first game is mostly left untouched here. Instead, new mechanics and moves are added to keep the game feeling fresh and I really enjoyed some and hated others (we’ll get there).
What’s there to love?
The most standout thing about the game is the music. The music here rivals Mario64 for how iconic and instantly recognizable most of the tracks are. They do a lot of the heavy work with theming without being too intricate or overbearing. The characters also do a good job of fleshing this game out into believable spaces.
In the first game, I felt like the entire game took place in a box. A small box. Here I don’t have that problem and a few of the levels feel like the characters really belong there. Platforming is also pretty good which can’t be said for a lot of stuff around this era. Every jump or move that I missed felt like my own fault for the most part. The variety of moves also adds a bit of much needed depth to the game which I really enjoyed. This game is easy to love but I don’t think that it would convert anyone who didn’t enjoy the first game since it is mostly a copy of that. Which leads me right into…
Lets get to the bad
How do I do this without making it sound like a rant? I can’t. If you have nostalgia for this game, be patient with me here. Lets talk controls. In no uncertain terms, the controls are awful and unlike the first game, I don’t think that playing on an original controller would fix much here.
To give an overview, basic platforming is normal controls and the trigger is a crouch button. The trigger is also how you activate your moves here. This is a limitation of the N64 controller and I respect the use made of it. But the amount of moves mapped to the C-stick is confusing. Normally it acts as camera control but once the crouch button is pressed, the one stick gets assigned to 4 separate moves for each character. And since the trigger is crouch, you must crouch each time to do each move. Thats a lot of trigger pressing and stick moving.
As a subset of controls, the people at Rare decided that Banjo-Kazooie was good but needed first person shooting to be great. Hopping on the trend at the time with this game hurts my brain because it controls horribly. And since the mapping is the same as shooters like GoldenEye, the controls are unusable for modern audiences. Is this fixed in the Xbox Live version? I don’t know, but I hope so. It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t get used on every single level, but it does.
Entire first person shooter sections in a collect-a-thon were not enjoyable to me, its not what I expect from a sequel here. Worse yet, its used heavily in the bossfight at the end which is just salt in the wound.
What about the genre?
The first game really established an entire genre and I was curious to see how it would get moved forward here. I want to be clear, I find these next few items negatives but I appreciated them because they’re the first missteps in this space. So what went wrong with the game style itself?
The largest sin for me is the sin of having a game about collection without self-contained levels. What I mean by that is that game objectives spill beyond the borders of each level and bleed either into the hub world or bleed into each other. A more minor sin of this kind is the kind of sin where you need to unlock something later in the game and come back to complete a level.
Modern games still have these features but they mitigate the problems by telling you that you need to wait or they give giant hints at other levels. In this game however, you might struggle at a puzzle for an hour only to find out that theres a move later that you unlock that makes this part possible.
For a good example: There is a level with a hot and cold side of a mountain. A move is given to the player to walk into hot water on the hot side of the mountain. You can press a switch in that pool to drain it, but it suggests to you that the water is just too hot. You can also turn into a snowball on the other side of the level.
So based on that info, you might search for awhile just to see if you can connect the cold side and hot side together. Or maybe you can throw your snowball self into the water. Or maybe a character can do it for you. None of those things solve your problem. What does solve your problem is pushing an ice cube off of the next level in the sky that then falls into the pool and cools it.
And this is the last thing I’ll really mention bad about this game: It makes poor use of its new moves and features and is inconsistent and that’s a shame. An example from the same level: there are two characters on the cold side of the mountain that need to be warmed up. One requires you to shoot fire eggs at them. The other requires you use the bird to sit on them like an egg. No indication of that move use is given. Its only ever used for eggs elsewhere. Frustrating.
So thats the gripe here. The feature creep is very real and you have too many moves doing too little in the game and it complicates the controls. They tried to do too much with this game and it hurt what was a very solid and tight experience from the first one.
Summarize Tooie To Me
Don’t let the criticisms color the game too much for you if you enjoy this kind of thing or just want to revisit it. For those who have nostalgia for it, you’ll overlook the annoyances pretty easily but I’d highly recommend playing on an original controller. I’d consider it almost necessary for this experience, especially for the first person sections. If you don’t have nostalgia for this, I’d tell you not to take the game too seriously. Don’t 100% it like I did and just sit back and enjoy the good music and fun characters and the puzzles or collectables. If you’re never going to play the game though, the soundtrack is also right there for you.
If you made it this far let me know what you think of my review, I’m always eager to hear what other people did or did not enjoy about the game and I’ll be active in the comments!
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