by:	July 05, 2005

Conker Live & Reloaded, originally tagged “Conker: Live & Uncut” when first announced nearly two years ago is Rareware’s second game to appear on Xbox after their disappointing performance with “Grabbed by the Ghoulies” (see our review here), Rareware goes back to the last game they made on the dying Nintendo 64 over four years ago, putting in the original “Conker’s Bad Fur Day” with updated visuals, sound, and slightly tweaked gameplay, and adds in all new multiplayer. The result is a mixed, but disappointing bag, although I know tons of Rareware fans reading this will look to me as a “hater” it is quite on the contrary. I have loved Rareware since the days of Super Nintendo, cheering for them all along but the fact of the matter is, Rare can do far better than this, and now we have to wait until the launch of Xbox 360 to see what they really can do.

Conker’s Bad Fur Day
I will be honest, I barely played the original “Conker’s Bad Fur Day” on Nintendo 64, at that time I was playing Soul Calibur on Dreamcast, and Perfect Dark on Nintendo 64, so I was looking forward to playing the game when I finally received it. The single player portion of the game isn’t so much of a platformer though, as it is a puzzle game, and you have to go around fitting all the pieces together. You will have some action in the game, but through the first half of the game you are running around with a bat, and there are very few enemies you can actually hit and kill. Usually, the only enemies you have to hit are these little crocodile things in tin armor, that when they hit you, they shoot out spikes. To kill them you just keep running up to them, whacking them, backing up, and repeat five times until they are dead. These guys are all over the place in the first five hours of the game at least, and a lot of the times will be totally out of place with their surroundings. It isn’t until later on when you will receive a shotgun, and later a machine gun were you actually get some action going on, but the enemies you are fighting against just stream straight towards you so there isn’t really a challenge in that sense.

You will learn very early on in the game that there are a lot of “B” moments in which you stand on a certain area and you are prompted to press B. These moments help you in many different times, such as pressing B and then getting to use a slingshot to destroy giant dung beetles. There is also another memorable instance in which you are in a giant crap cave, and you are fighting Great Singing Poo boss. You stand on the B prompting area, and have to throw toilet paper straight into his mouth. The B moments normally mean you will pull out a random item that I guess Conker had sitting in his pocket all along, but it also helps the illusion that he is just a cartoon living in a cartoon world.

The main area you are in throughout most of the game is actually pretty cool, with tons of vibrancy. You will spend a lot of your time in a dung beetles area, but it is all blended together nicely. The great thing is you will for the most part be able to see every single area you will go to in the game from the time you start playing. They all sort of blend together also which is very hard to come by in any sort of platformer. The bad part is though, that there is really no transition between areas unless the occasional cutscene guides you into the right direction. You are stuck feeling like you didn’t do something in the level you just came out of, because sometimes the objectives don’t feel like they have all been tied up. The actual game itself will only clock at the most fifteen hours to beat it, and a second time will take you about nine hours to beat it. Although there really isn’t any reason to play the game over a second time, especially since there isn’t much of cohesiveness there.

The actual story and objective of the game makes even less sense. In one part you have the Panther King who wants to use Conker for a leg on his table, then you have Conker who just wants to go home in the beginning, but I guess he also wants to go around on adventures and get some money. Then you have Conker’s girlfriend Berri, who is apparently captured by rock people, and sent to a weasel’s nightclub, but she doesn’t really want to be rescued and stays with him to the end of the game. A lot of the game just doesn’t make sense, and the story sucks loudly. If this was an intention of the creators, then they succeeded.