Nuts & Bolts is little about the platforming of previous Banjo games. Under the instruction of the mysterious and aloof Lord Of Games, or LOG, the franchise has evolved into something like a Wacky Races construction kit; an intuitive and powerful vehicle builder that allows you to cobble together wild contraptions that fly and float and everything in between.

When it’s at its best, the game gives you an obscure challenge and a handful of wheels, panels, spring-loaded boots, egg cannons, wings and propellers, and lets you experiment. Thanks to a robust but delightfully cartoony physics engine, this process invites players to really think about aerodynamics, balance and thrust to create the vehicle which will be optimum for the task.

We built a chopper featuring a giant scoop to lift bowling balls on to plinths, spent hours constructing roll-cages in the hope of topping our last score on the ski-jump, and settled on mad swastika-shaped propulsion systems to send a giant armature spinning into a stack of giant dominoes.

The problem is that it takes a long time to unwrap this kernel, buried as it is in a couple of hours of kid-glove challenges, featuring a good deal of dubiously rubber-banded racing and a fussy means of progression necessitating endless trips to a largely superfluous hub-world.

Showdown Town, as it is known, is a pleasant enough place and, like much of the game, is beautifully rendered (even if there is something kleptomaniacal about the jumble of styles and textures that Rare throws down), suffused with the kind of joyous colour we had almost forgotten Xbox 360 could produce. Rare is borrowing from the best – there’s much to compare in terms of structure between Showdown Town and Super Mario Galaxy’s hub, although the former is substantially bigger.

But Rare seems to have missed the point a little – Galaxy’s hub was a prettified means to an end, and rarely an obstruction. Nor did it take a full minute to load. Pretty though it is, Showdown Town is hugely unwieldy by contrast. As with Galaxy, a successful sortie to one of the worlds will garner you a number of shining goodies, in this case jigsaw pieces, which are used to unlock further levels. Though this unlocking was automatic in Galaxy, allowing you to drop straight back into the action, Showdown Town asks you to collect these items from dispensers, load them into your vehicle and trundle them off to a central bank. Equally laborious is the collection or purchase of extra parts for your vehicle.

When all you want to do is to get on with the pleasure of creation, Nuts & Bolts has you chug through loading screens to make deliveries. Want to play more than three challenges in a row? Then you’ll have to load back into Showdown Town, walk five paces to the door that takes you to the next tier of challenges in the place you just came from, and sit through another loading screen. Even accessing the creation tools while in a level requires a short loading screen; given that you want to dart back to the workshop to tweak things after nearly every attempt at an event, this is almost unforgivable.

Nuts & Bolts fills you with the thrill of experimentation, but then raps you on the knuckles with every iteration. But for all its cumbersome ways, Nuts & Bolts has much else that goes in its favour. Surprisingly, perhaps, one of these things is Banjo, a character who has never captured public imagination in the same way that Nintendo’s icons have.

And yet here the franchise is at its most charming and witty by being wholly self-deprecating, playing upon its second-rate status next to Mario while making sly digs at Rare’s other properties and even Xbox 360 itself. One of the levels you visit, LOGBox 720, sees Banjo travel around the entrails of a videogame console, building innovative contraptions to put out fires on malfunctioning components.

For one heart-stopping moment, the screen flickers with those ominous magenta artefacts that usually precede the funereal process of sending a console back to Microsoft – but we’ve been pranked by those wags at Rare. Nuts & Bolts is a clever, colourful and witty game – one which deserves better than to be hidden behind stodgy tutorials, flabby interfaces and a host of loading screens.

Early on, during one of the many cutscenes that stand between you and being allowed to actually play, the Lord of Games returns the tubby, retired Banjo to fighting-fit form. You rather wish he might do the same to the game itself – trimming off the fat and giving the player immediate and unlimited access to the parts of it that most appeal.

7/10