Conker: Live & Reloaded Review (Microsoft Xbox, 2005)

Conker’s Bad Fur Day was wild. This late Nintendo 64 release transformed what was planned to be a kid friendly platformer into a raunchy mature themed romp. Nintendo fans ate it up. This led to rampant speculation about a sequel. New consoles were on the horizon after all. No one could have imagined that Conker would completely skip the Gamecube, and instead would land on the Xbox. Microsoft’s acquisition of Rareware was one of the most stunning events of that generation. One of their first projects under the Xbox umbrella was a full remake of Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Today we’re writing about it. Is Conker: Live & Reloaded worth playing today? Let’s check it out.

Meet Conker. He’s a well meaning and good hearted, but kind of raunchy anthropomorphic squirrel. Conker is also the star of the game, if you haven’t figured that out by now. The story begins with our little guy at the bar phoning in to his girlfriend that he’s going to be late. Apparently some soldiers going to war threatened him with a good time, and now Conker is going to stay out late drinking with them.

This brings us to the next morning. Conker awakens hung over in a field (we’ve all been there) with little idea as to what happened. He just wants to get home. Problem is he doesn’t know which direction that is. With some help from an alcoholic scarecrow named Birdy Conker is on his way taking the only path forward. Meanwhile far away the ill tempered ruler of the land, the Panther King, is furious over his current dilemma. He keeps spilling his milk. The table on which he rests his glass is missing a leg. He orders his in-castle scientist to find a solution. The problem for Conker is that the only one he can cook up is using a red squirrel of the exact measurements of our hero in place of the fourth leg. The king sends his henchmen out to collect the squirrel, and thus begins the adventure.

That’s Conker: Live & Reloaded in a nut shell. The plot is pretty off-the-wall, but that’s the tamest part of the game. The game is full of the lowest brow humor you can imagine. It’s like a parody of your traditional platformer. Characters curse, there’s over the top gore, and the game focuses perhaps a bit too hard on flatulence and excrement. Some of it hits, and some of it’s a miss. When I was younger I thought the game was hilarious. It had me in stitches. Now that I’m older (and arguably more mature) many of the jokes get repetitive or just plain don’t land. I’m not too proud to admit it still made me laugh occasionally. Conker: Live & Reloaded’s strongest point is that it doesn’t take itself seriously. At all. Honestly the best jokes were new, and break the fourth wall to poke fun at remakes.

It’s vivacious, it’s raunchy, and it’s downright gross at times. It’s Conker. Take it or leave it. The story hasn’t been dramatically altered but some scenes have been changed. The gameplay though remains largely the same. At its core this is a 3D platformer with a heavy emphasis on action. Rather than stomping on enemies heads Conker instead hits them with first a frying pan, and then trades this in for a baseball bat with nails. The biggest change to gameplay is that in order to attack he has to enter targeting mode. This shifts the camera to sort of an over the shoulder perspective, and from here you swing the bat with the right trigger. Is it better than the old method? Not really. Is this is a big deal? Nope.

Combat is okay. It’s nothing special. It’s mostly memorizing enemy patterns and then striking in a way that keeps our little guy from taking damage. The game also switches things up constantly with context sensitive pads. These often change gameplay temporarily by giving Conker a new item to use. For example, in one area activating the pad give shim a slingshot and you can fire shots at the enemies. Another hands him off a roll of toilet paper to throw at enemies. There are a ton of different variations to this and it helps keep gameplay remarkably fresh. The boss battles in particular make heavy use of this mechanic, and it allows them to all play out just a bit different from one another. I’m all for keeping things fresh, and Conker: Live & Reloaded does a great job of this.

Aside from the innate ability to jump, and strike enemies with melee weapons, what else can Conker do? Not a whole lot. He’s a squirrel, after all. I do enjoy his ability to twirl his tail around mid jump. This allows him to briefly hover in the air. It helps significantly with some of the trickier platforming challenges. One thing I found odd is that Conker’s life is measured in chocolate. Anti-gravity chocolate as the game refers to it. He can collect up to six pieces, and each time you’re hit by a foe you lose one. When they’re all gone you simply restart from the last reached checkpoint, but not before meeting the grim reaper and going through a brief dialogue sequence in the underworld. Checkpoints are never too far back, so you aren’t overly punished for running out of life.

Unfortunately the stages are a little streamlined. I’m comparing it to Super Mario 64 here. There isn’t a whole lot of exploration you can actually do. Generally the path forward is easy to figure out because the barriers make the path narrow. There are still mountains to climb, buildings to enter, and caves to explore. None of these are all that wide open. My big complaint with this design is that Rare did what they do worst here. I’m talking about collecting things. The game pads its length by requiring you to find items, and bring them to specific locations. This means there’s a fair amount of backtracking. You run into many characters requesting you to bring them things in order to open the way forward. Furthermore each area has money hidden in it, and you need this later on to progress. I’ve never been a fan of these mechanics.

Aside from the fourth wall breaking tutorial, and the spiked baseball bat, a few other changes were made to the game as well. Some of them good, and some bad. Let’s start with what I like. Some of the puzzles and obstacles have been altered. For the most part they’re all simplified. It’s the particularly annoying parts of the original game that got axed. I’m looking at you, electric eel puzzle. Nothing of any real substance was removed from the main game, so that’s good. In a baffling move though Rare censored the game. Foul language present in the N64 release has now been bleeped out. I will never understand this. Isn’t it Nintendo that usually requires censorship? It’s not a big deal because I’m no longer a teen. Still, I’m left scratching my head on this one.

The biggest, and most unfortunate cut is local multi-player. Conker’s Bad Fur Day had some incredible and inventive modes to play with friends that were a ton of fun. Live & Reloaded? Nada. For this release Rare focused on the console’s online capabilities to deliver a more generic third person shooter to play online. Thing is, the servers have been shut down for decades now. The only way you can experience this is by linking consoles together locally. I don’t know anyone who still keeps their Xbox laying around so I’m simply unable to play multiplayer here. Surely Rare could have done better. I mean come on, they had the blueprint and everything.

Rare are masters with whatever hardware they’re working with. At the time their games were generally the best looking of any software developer. Conker: Live & Reloaded is no different. This game is absolutely beautiful At the time it was breathtaking. Live & Reloaded looked like it was a generation ahead of everything else. The fur shading on the characters is unmatched even to this day. There’s also amazing depth blur, and bloom effects that were truly next level. The environments are the weak point, but they still look fantastic with great textures. Developers were steering away from colorful games at the time so Live & Reloaded was a breath of fresh air. The soundtrack is also quite good with new renditions of music from the N64 game. Now they’re fully instrumental though instead of midi. I love the soundtrack.