Conker: Live & Reloaded

"A Review From The Perspective Of A Person Without X-Box Live"

Intro
This is a game from Rare that came out near the end of the N64's life. I didn't play it then but I thought I might as well try it for the X-Box. I'll be rating the game based on these categories: story, audio, graphics, game play and re-playability/multi-player.

Story- Score - 8.5/10
The story in this game is pulled off so well and the humor through out is great. Anyway, there are different plots through out the game Conker starts out by getting drunk one night and getting lost on his way home, he gets involved in a war against the evil Tediz and becomes king. You are told right off the bat how the story ends but how it gets to that point is much different than what you expected to see. The story will lead you to many places and you will see many great movie parody's along the way,

Audio - Score - 8/10
I found that the music really suited the game. The problem is, I never really heard it too often. There wasn't really a strong ambiance to the game. Each world had it's own music and the music served it's purpose to a certain extent. All that really needed to be done was make the background music a little bit louder. The sound effects and voice acting was very well done through out the whole game. The voices are all a kind of cartoony which fits for the game but also makes it more comical. The only thing that kind of got on my nerves about the voice acting was how slow the characters talked, they needed to be just a bit faster.

Graphics - Score - 9/10
This game is very, very nice to look at. The creators used great colours for everything and there is a very hight poly-count for each character. There are some very good particle and bloom effects found through out. It was also very cool how they make it look like there was actual blood or rain drops on your TV screen. All the fur on the caracters looks great, it's nice to see Rare carrying over some of their fur creating technology from Star Fox Adventures Overall the game just looks great for the cartoon style that it's done in.

Gameplay - Score - 7.5/10
I'm going to say it straight out: This is one of the most frustrating games I have played in a very long time. I can understand a game being hard like Ninja Gaiden for instance. But, the thing that separates the hard but fun to play games from the hard and frustrating games is that the fun game, when you die it's not a cheap death. In Conker 90% of the time when you die (and you will die a lot) it is not your fault. Bosses will hit you and before Conker recovers so he can move again the boss will hit you again. Some times you die due to poor inpercise controls. The list goes on and on. Luckily what saves this game is that you feel you have accomplished something after beating a boos or getting past a choke point. This game, through most of it plays, like a platformer but there are many different styles throughout, there is a cart-style racing element, a flying element, a third person shooter and so much more found through the game. As I mentioned before though, the game punishes you for making mistakes and you are quickly taught to observe the bosses patterns of attacks. Another thing is that this game runs off the three lives system. Thats all well and good but one you're out of lives it doesn't make a difference because you are put back into the same spot that you were in except now you've got 3 lives again. They could have done away with the three lives system if it doesn't do anything to alter game play. Another problem I had was that often you didn't know what to do, weather it was during a boos fight or how to proceed to the next area. This causes a major problem as you are often left guessing what to do next. Overall this game is just very difficult to play and the controls are loose and unforgiving.

Re-playability / Multi-Player - Score - 7/10
All there really is that you unlock for us people without X-Box live is an option to un-censor the the single player experience. But that alone doesn't really give me enough incentive to go through the 12 hour single player campaign again. Now the multi-player. It's not that great. The camera angle is low and the game displays ever bodys user-name no matter how far away they are this leads to just a bunch of clutter in screen. Another problem is that the characters are very small targets and the aiming in this game is not very precise. There are offline bots to play with which is fun for a while but other than that there isn't much else to do. Well I guess there's chapter X which is supposed to tie into the story and explain more about the war between the Squirrels and the Tediz

OUTRO & FINAL RECOMMENDATION
I'm having a really tough time recommending this game to any people with out X-Box Live. If you've played or own the N64 version, stick to that and rent this one. I say though, rent it play it and beat it, then if you really like it pick it up.

FINAL SCORE - 7.5/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/06/05