Conker: Live and Reloaded Review

Oh Conker, I remember you fondly. You first appeared in Conker’s Bad Fur Day as Nintendo desperately tried to shed its “kiddie” image in the waning days of the N64, bringing drunken prattle and endless poop jokes to a genre mired in sticky, gooey sweetness. Together we fought dung beetles and giant animate piles of poo, but my fondest memory of you was our first introduction at E3 back in 2000. It was there that Nintendo shoved a free beer in my hand (or two, or, oh who was counting anyway…) and sat me in front of the funniest Saving Private Ryan spoof that I’ve seen to this very day. There was just something magical about watching a Higgens boat full of cute, fuzzy squirrels in little army uniforms hit the beach and get mowed down by fascist teddy bears. That kind of irreverent creativity does not come along often enough, which is why it is good to see you back again, as cute and as drunk as ever. How could you not love a game with armed-to-the-teeth squirrels and teddy bears on its cover, with a large warning slapped across the front that the game is most assuredly not for children…?

Conker: Live & Reloaded has a bit of a dual personality, not unlike our friend Conker who can be both surly, drunk Conker and clever, sober Conker. On the one hand you have a remake of the original game – with cutting-edge Xbox graphics of course – which is for the most part a port true to the original. On the other you have a third-person multiplayer shooter, complete with soldier classes, a variety of maps, and 16 player mayhem. Well, two games in one gets you two reviews in one, but you’ll still need to buy your own beer.

First off, if you played Bad Fur Day the remake will be very familiar to you. There’s very little which is different from the game so playing it will be stroll (or stagger) down memory lane for you. Of course you do get the benefit of the updated graphics which make full use of the Xbox’s power. Conker looks far more lifelike than in his first outing – in fact, this time he actually has fur that you can see, making him appropriately fuzzy and therefore 3.2 times as cute as before. The environments are also sharper and more colorful than before, to the point where this is probably one of the best looking platformers available on the Xbox today.

OK, so you never played Bad Fur Day and you hate those reviews that just compare a game to a bunch of other games that you’ve never played. Well, don’t worry; I’m going to tell you what it’s all about. The rest of you can just let your eyes gloss over and skim ahead until you see the words “PAY ATTENTION NOW”. OK, off with you. Start skimming.

Alright, you’re still with us so you’re new to this whole Conker thing. You’ve probably figured out by now that Conker is a squirrel. Well, Conker lives in a world where fuzzy woodland critters go on benders at the local bar, poo sings opera, advice is dispatched by a scarecrow that has “freed his mind” at least once too often, and a panther king needs a squirrel to replace a table leg so that his milk won’t spill. Conker’s bad fur day begins when he tries to stumble home to his aerobics-obsessed girlfriend Berri after an all-nighter at a bar with the boys. Well before you know it, Conker has trouble finding his way home, Berri is kidnapped, and that panther is making trouble for our furry little friend. Yep, Conker is in for one bad fur day. Those are the basics of the situation, but what follows is less coherent story and more steam of consciousness strangeness. Conker is truly a platformer for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force generation.

On the flipside of the coin, the gameplay is more in line with that of traditional platformers – at least for the first three quarters of it or so. You’ll need to make your way through jump sequences, bash enemies, and solve a few puzzles. Take away all of the humor and strange characters and you’re left with a pretty straightforward platform game, so if you despise platform games you’re really not going to like this portion of the game. The jump sequences can be frustrating at times as the camera can be a little wonky and you can be stuck making jumps that are difficult to line up. It’s also not always clear as to how far a platform extends, which can lead to falls off of the edge or jump attempts made from too far back to make the next platform.

Fighting enemies is more of a chore than anything else. To defeat them you need to run up to them and give them a whack with a baseball bat and then back off as they counter attack. This usually requires a fair amount of running in circles with the camera spinning as well and trying to line itself up. It can be frustrating when you can’t align yourself to hit your enemy because he is out of view or both he and the camera are moving in different directions at once. Maybe the developers were trying to simulate the experience of drunkenness…

Another issue is that the game is not very good at guiding you or giving you clues as to what to do next. There will be times when you’ll find yourself wandering around, unsure of where to go or what to do. Needless to say this can be pretty frustrating at times unless you happen to enjoy mindless meandering.

Conker does add a new play mechanic not found in your usual platform game, and this one works pretty well. As you make your way through the levels you’ll come across circles on the ground emblazoned with a large “B”. These are context sensitive spots and to activate them you need to step onto them and press the B button. What happens next depends on the context, hence “context sensitive”. In one case you may find a slingshot in your pocket to use to shoot enemies and in another you may find yourself transformed into a crushing anvil. It’s actually kind of fun to find one of these buttons as you never quite know what will happen when you do.

As you reach the latter half of the game it goes under a transformation and is no longer a platformer. The game then becomes more of an action shooter and it is during this portion of the game that the infamous Saving Private Ryan sequence takes place. If shooting evil Nazi-like teddy bears sounds like fun to you, then you’ll really enjoy this part of the game. That’s because it actually is fun to shoot evil Nazi-like teddy bears (and other nasties). The action is fast-paced and exciting, as well as gory in a humorous sort of way. It would have helped the game overall to have the action-packed sequences appear periodically over the course of the entire game instead of just at the end. As it is the shooter action serves as a bonus to those who play their way through the entire platform portion, which is not something shooter fans are apt to do.