There's a reason why Rare are so revered - and why Microsoft paid three hundred and fifty million dollars to bring them in-house - and it's simply because, from those early days of Jetpac, Atic Atac and Sabre Wulf (if you remember those then you're really old, like me!) on the ZX Spectrum through to their golden era on the N64, they've always made terrific games. Arguably the game that they are most famous for is Goldeneye, which is still regarded by many as the best first person shooter of all-time - but there were plenty of other games on the N64 for which they were loved, including an assortment of Donkey Kong releases, Conker's Bad Fur Day and, of course, Banjo-Kazooie. I confess that I never got around to checking out the previous games in the series, so my vision isn't tinted with a rosy colour - but even without any nostalgia, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is still great fun.

With that said, I predict that this is a real Marmite type of game - you're either going to love it or hate it, and I'm sure there will be some gamers who are turned off by the short burst nature of the missions (none of which last more than a few minutes and some of which are over in a few seconds). Not only this, but Rare has made the bold move of straying away from the platforming formula that fans of the original games loved; instead, in Nuts & Bolts you spend almost the entire adventure driving around in some contraption or another. This is bound to be a sore point for some hardcore Banjo-Kazooie lovers, but I for one applaud Rare's continuing efforts to do something different, as witnessed in many of their recent releases, such as Grabbed by the Ghoulies, Viva Pinata and Kameo: Elements of Power. Furthermore, while certainly not perfect, the vehicular-based challenges, platforming and combat make for some entertaining, if at times frustrating, gameplay.

The story of Banjo-Kazooie again breaks away from the norm; our heroes are found at their home in Spiral Mountain, relaxing and playing a videogame. They've put on quite a bit of weight due to being out of action for so long and when the evil witch Gruntilda turns up, as a bouncing skull after losing her head in Banjo-Tooie, they're ill prepared for another conflict. The extended opening sequence introduces L.O.G., the creator of all videogames, a floating phantom with a TV screen for a head and a display of Pong for its eyes and nose, who restores our heroes, and their nemesis, to a state of relative fitness and whisks them away to Showdown Town, the main hub world of the game, challenging Banjo and Kazooie to collect all of the Jiggies in the various game worlds he has created and Gruntilda to stop them. The story is throwaway fun - little more than an excuse for the adventure that follows - and the game is very self-aware, poking fun at itself and videogames in general, as our heroes are perfectly aware that they are starring in another videogame. It's unusual in this respect but hardly a reason to keep your interest; instead, it's down to the gameplay to entice you back for more, and the new vehicle system at the centre of the game does a very good job in this regard.

The main premise of Nuts & Bolts is the ability to head to Mumbo's Motors and create your own vehicles, using a wide range of building blocks. You begin with basic blocks such as cubes, wedges, panels and pipes, along with the obligatory driver's seat and the wheels you need for any land-based vehicle. As you progress through the adventure though, many more parts become available, either awarded to you by Mumbo, purchased in a nearby store in the town square, or packed in the dozens of crates that are scattered around Showdown Town, just waiting for you to retrieve them. Half of the battle with these crates, as well as the musical notes that are used as the game's currency, is figuring out how to reach them; many are placed high up on the rooftops of the town's buildings and the only vehicle you can use in Showdown Town is your trolley, which to begin with is very limited. The key is to collect those that you can get your paws on and then wait until you gain upgrades to your trolley, such as high grip wheels for climbing steep slopes, springs for leaping onto low roofs, and floaters for speeding across the expanses of water, in order to access new areas of the town. You also need to look out for poles, ladders and drainpipes that you can climb, which lead to the few on-foot platform segments, leaping across rooftops and balancing along wires, as you seek out every last note and crate.

Right from the start, the first thing that really strikes you is the quality of the visuals; cartoon style in nature, they are of superb quality throughout, with some amazingly detailed textures and perfectly smooth modelling and animation for Banjo and the cast of colourful characters that populate Showdown Town and the other hub worlds that you visit. Not only does every area look gorgeous but the design of each location is striking, making for some original and unusual areas. Showdown Town itself features a bustling centre populated by various animals with a huge tower (climb to the very top of this for an achievement), as well as some docks, a seafront complete with a little retro arcade game, a lake, a castle, and more. Nutty Acres is the next hub world you encounter, made up of patchwork textures that are sewn together, animals that look like they are built from blocks and trees that you can knock over as though simply placed in a model. The sky in this level is gorgeous and you can fly very high up to discover the mechanisms at the top, which reveal that the whole area, consisting of rolling hills and a volcano, surrounded by beaches and water, is an enclosed dome. The scaling when you fly up and dive down is wonderfully fluid. The Logbox 720 world is much more claustrophobic, a busy and colourful realm of microchips and technology, with fans and even a coolant system scattered around its multiple levels, while Banjoland is a museum that fans of the series will love, with a range of exhibits taken straight out of previous Banjo games. The Jiggoseum is arguably the most impressive level, a gigantic coliseum surrounded by spectator stands, while the Terrarium of Terror is a space-based biosphere that's reminiscent of the Lost in Space movie.

Each of these worlds plays host to a number of characters, old and new, who take on different roles and who dish out the missions for the five or six acts on offer. You access each act via doors in different districts of Showdown Town that are gradually unlocked as you accumulate jiggies, then you use your handy HUD map to home in on the characters to receive the missions that you need to complete. This is where the vehicles come into play, and the variety of tasks is vast. Sometimes there are straight up races, on land, across the sea or in the air (or even a combination), sometimes you need to retrieve items and bring them back within a time limit. Other tasks include picking up and dropping off characters, destroying targets, pulling off a series of stunts, fending off an onslaught of Grunty's annoying little robots, rolling giant balls into goals and many more. While there is inevitably some repetition, no two tasks are exactly the same and the levels get increasingly trickier to navigate as you progress, with the time limits becoming tighter.

For certain events you are forced to use a specific vehicle but most of the time you can use one of your choice, which is where the real strategy of the game comes into play - building the ideal vehicle for the current mission. If you're retrieving objects then you need to build a tray into your vehicle, while taxiing people around requires the installation of passenger seats and you need to use propellers or, later on, jet engines to power planes, helicopters and boats. There's also a range of weapons available but with no lock on feature or crosshairs, it's important to pick the best ones for the task at hand.

It's very easy to lose hours in the garage, tinkering with your latest contraption until it performs as well as it can then pimping it up by painting the individual parts. Every vehicle needs a power source, with bigger engines and multiple engines increasing your maximum speed, along with fuel and ammo for weapons; fitting all this onto a compact vehicle can be challenging and you'll find yourself often using engines, fuel and ammo to form the body, perhaps with some spoilers at the back for better handling and high grip wheels for climbing steep slopes. Some games require you to push items around, so building a powerful, heavy, pushing vehicle is a must. When it comes to retrieving objects, if you don't want to have to hop out of your vehicle to load them into a tray using Kazooie's magic staff, which you can use to lift and move almost any object in the game, then you can equip a sticky ball that shoots out and latches onto any item it touches.

I wasn't too far into the game before I went back to the drawing board to create the best all-purpose vehicle possible with the current parts that I had. Using every engine and fuel cell available, with a tray in the centre for carrying objects, I threw on some wheels, some bumpers at the front (great for knocking obstacles out of the way), and some floaters at the sides, which allow you to drive across water and can be deflated if you want to go beneath the surface, along with a chair that has an oxygen supply for aquatic exploration. The icing on the cake came in the form of retractable propellers, allowing me to become airborne at the touch of button. With my new template ready, I saved the blueprint and then created a number of variants that used different weapons, such as the egg guns (rapid fire cannons), egg grenades (slower but with explosive projectiles), homing missiles, and turrets, which you sit in while stationery to fend off incoming targets. There are plenty of gadgets to experiment with too, such as the boot in a box for kicking things away, the chameleon for generating a temporary cloak and the smokescreen, among many, many others. I don't want to spoil all the surprises but the possibilities are endless and you can create anything from a super-charged motorbike to a heavily armoured tank of over two hundred pieces. I also created a number of custom vehicles, including a very wide pusher for clearing away the igloo in Banjoland, and a vehicle with two massive trays, surrounded by bars with a gap at the front, and propellers and balloons to get it airborne, which came in extremely handy for missions where you need to retrieve and return a number of large objects; one of the best aspects of the mission designs is that they encourage you to experiment and create a range of vehicles for a range of tasks.

Personally I found the game very addictive and stuck at it for hours at a time; there's a real 'just one more go' factor, enticing you onwards to earn the next jiggy and unlock another act of another world so you can see what parts you'll be awarded or what will come into stock to purchase at the market, where you can buy not only vehicle parts but blueprints, which are great to use as a foundation for a new vehicle and feature some highly creative and varied designs. It's certainly not perfect, though; while the handling of most vehicles is reasonable, some of those that you are forced to use are prone to tipping over or have very sharp steering, and your inertia when you bounce into the air can throw you off course when you're trying to beat a time record in a race.

The jinjo challenges can be a bit of a chore at times too; completing them awards tokens that you can use in Jinjo Bingo to earn notes and new items. These include ramming a spherical jinjo a set distance, reaching a certain speed, racing, taxiing a jinjo from one location to another, tracking down a lost object and pushing a jinjo out of an arena and they become a little tiresome after a while. The helicopters are hard to control too; creating one that can rise up vertically as well as power forwards fast is a challenge, although the planes are a lot more forgiving. It's extremely annoying when you're saddled with a specific vehicle that doesn't handle well however, and some of the challenges with no choice of vehicle are more of a battle against the controls than the task itself - there's plenty of scope here to get irritated, yet I still found myself coming back for another go during these frustrating periods.

The boss battles with Grunty are often a bit simple or tedious (or both) too, although at least there's scope to approach them however you like with a custom vehicle, and the loading times are intrusive to say the least; every trip between hub worlds takes a good twenty seconds, there's a brief loading time for every mission, and of course another one when you go to the garage to tinker with your creations. You do get used to it and it's understandable given the quality of the visuals, but sitting through loading screens so frequently makes the game feel more disjointed than it otherwise would have done.

Probably the biggest bugbear of all is a quirk to do with assigning functions to the face buttons; anything that you can activate, such as floaters, weapons and retractable propellers, can be assigned to the X, A and B buttons for activation while driving. However, once you've created a vehicle with three functions, if you decide to modify it to add more functions, you can't save the new button assignments that you want; so, if you switch your egg gun out for a laser then have to reassign the controls at the start of every single mission - either that or create a new vehicle from scratch. This is so annoying that I recreated vehicles on more than one occasion just to get around it as I gained access to new gadgets and weapons.

The audio of the game could have been better, too; it was a surprising choice not to give the range of characters voices and I think they'd have been more appealing with decent actors behind them, rather than taking the old-school approach of signature caws, grunts and cries. Worse still, the text is tiny and hard to read on standard definition screens, particularly when you're looking through the stats to see what you still need to collect - and in certain cut scenes there's barely enough time to read the text before it vanishes from the screen. I didn't really get into the characters that much and the attempts at humour rarely made me laugh; some people might enjoy it, but Sam & Max or Ratchet & Clank this ain't. Banjo and Kazooie are reasonably entertaining characters but they lack the personality of the likes of Mario and co., or indeed the others that I've mentioned above - I never really connected with them, they were just characters in the game to be interacted with rather than savoured. Fortunately, the lack of voice acting is the only weak aspect of the audio, as all the effects are great and the soundtrack is ridiculously catchy, with a range of variations on the main theme in Showdown Town, which change seamlessly as you move between districts, as well as a number of quirky and distinctive tunes for each of the other hub worlds.

The single player is vast and will keep you going for a long time, but there are plenty of options when it comes to local or online multiplayer too, with a series of sports games and races on offer. The sports games include flinging your vehicle off a ramp in order to hit a range of scoring areas and games that involve knocking huge balls into goals, while the race courses are reasonably imaginative, based of course across the various hub worlds. Up to eight players can join the fun, for solo or team games, and although the multiplayer probably doesn't have the longevity of a traditional racer, it's entertaining enough; by far the best part is seeing what vehicles other people have designed, plus you can share blueprints, photos and video replays of your greatest triumphs with other gamers. A sense of community is encouraged and there's an endless array of designs to see whenever you enter a game that allows custom vehicles.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is distinctively different from the norm - and from what we were expecting - but this is by no means a bad thing. Visually it's stunning, with a cartoon style that's closer to Pixar quality than I've seen in a game before, while Rare's brave move away from traditional, platform-based gameplay is definitely a success and the flexibility and simplicity of the vehicle creator makes it a joy to use. The single player is huge, with hour upon hour of exploration and missions if you want to 100% the game, while the multiplayer has enough depth to entertain in short bursts. It won't be for everyone, but those who are drawn in by its charm and by the very creative aspect of designing your own vehicles with literally endless possibilities, will find a wealth of enjoyment.

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).