Banjo-Kazooie

A true platforming classic, but with some serious flaws

Banjo-Kazooie will rightfully go down in history as one of the all-time greatest platforming games out there. It's accessible but challenging, and has some great mechanics that you won't encounter in other games. It's definitely worth picking up and playing through, but it has a few major flaws that will have you wanting to throw your controller. There's not much I can say about the game that wasn't covered in the other review in terms of the games positives, but as far as the negatives go...

The camera in B-K is infinitely frustrating. There's no option to tell the camera to stay put, so on those sections which require very precise, slow movements, it can obviously be quite irritating to have the camera suddenly rotate 45 degrees and thereby change the direction you're telling Banjo to move. For 90% of the game, it won't be an issue, but dear god will it frustrate you during that other 10%.

The other issue is a glitch in the game that renders the most time-consuming achievement missable. Each of the game's 9 levels have 100 musical notes for you to collect for a total of 900. However, there is a minigame that you also must complete for an achievement, and this minigame requires you to complete jigsaw puzzles within a time limit, and these jigsaws portray full-motion portions of the game. In one of these jigsaws, Banjo is pictured collecting 4 of the notes you need for the achievement. The game will mark those notes as collected and remove them from the game, but it will not actually add them to your total, which makes it impossible to collect all 900. You'll be left with 896, and your only option will be to play the entire game again. This wouldn't be so bad, but the 4 that are sent to oblivion are from the 2nd to last portion of the last level of the game, which means that unless you wait until the very end of the game to do these jigsaw puzzles, you will render that achievement unobtainable. It's easy enough to avoid if you know what's coming, but do a Google search for "Banjo-Kazooie missing 4 notes" and you'll see how common of a problem this is.

Most would probably consider Banjo-Kazooie to be better than a 3-star game, but for me personally, glitched achievements and camera-induced frustrations are some of the biggest cons a game can have. Definitely still a game worth checking out, but know what's ahead of you before you do.
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