Besides a few small QoL improvements and very beautiful visuals, there isn't much to write home about this remake. The censorship and added enemies are absolutely pointless and they remove a part in the war chapter that honestly did not need to be taken out of the game. All of these critisisms and the fact this remake came out less than 5 years after the original release detract from the remake. Characters sound more soulless than they did in the original game too. Given the multiplayer servers are dead, I cannot properly compare it between the N64 version's multiplayer but this version's multiplayer may actually be better in my opinion based on what I have seen. Unless you've played the original and are curious to try this remake (I was for the longest time), I suggest playing the original game instead whether it is through Rare Replay or emulated.

Given Chris Seavor's ambitions for Conker as a series in the 00s, this game probably needed to exist to satisfy them. It's a bit much to dump a sequel to a limited release N64 game on the Xbox audience without giving them a way to experience the original. But I do think the world would've largely benefitted from just seeing the original ported, warts and all.

Yes, Live & Reloaded is in a lot of ways a cleaned up experience from Bad Fur Day. Yes, the graphics are quite impressive and show off a lot of what the original Xbox could do. Yes, the full orchestration is great and does a lot for the overall experience. Yes, "Bats Tower" is no longer suffering. Yes, "Spooky" is honestly an all-around improvement, a feat given that it was already a highlight of Bad Fur Day's singleplayer (and I include in that the inexplicable Van Helsing costume change). Yes, "It's War" is far more visually interesting, with the varied environs doing a lot to add to the sense of Conker infiltrating an enemy stronghold. Yes, that one Tediz mini-boss is a fun addition. And yes, the game continues its self-awareness by acknowledging its nature as a remake, at least in the beginning.

But I feel like a lot of the intentionality of the original is gone. On some level, Bad Fur Day's constant abuse of the player was the point, especially given how easy it is to try again. A lot of the original's visual nuance is missing, from how some characters look to how some characters animate. For goodness sakes, Conker's so furry that it's hard to read his expression at times, and you miss out on little visual cues like him flashing the camera an aggressively-nonchalant grimace with "(Hope she's rich 'cos she ain't cute.)" Or using the multiplayer Grunt models for the Grey Squirrels in "It's War", with their cocksure smirks, COMPLETELY undercuts the tone of the Saving Private Ryan opening and parody. Or how the toilet goblin clearly has spare toilet paper, or how the cavemen just kinda do a stupid dance to taunt Conker and Fangy in the arena, or how the blueblood catfish's money uses the SAME model as the other wads of cash instead of a new one...

This is without getting into the usual hot-button issue, the game's extra censorship. I can actually generally accept it this time around - most of the jokes with the cusses are simply that the characters cuss, and a bleep conveys that as well as the swear itself. But of course, censoring "Sloprano" is a huge buzzkill, as was censoring, weirdly, that one joke about confusing the words "fellatio" and "Fidelio". What, couldn't be assed to write another joke? Really, I wouldn't mind so much if the censorship thing was consistent; what, are "shite" and "feck" okay because the dumb Americans at Microsoft are too stupid to realize these are accented ways of saying "shit" and "fuck"? Then why censor "twat" in "Sloprano" when it only rhymes with "scat" in British slang (since Americans would rhyme it with "hot")?

But the most egregious thing of all is the goblins. Like, I get it - you want to increase the emphasis on combat, and you want to get there by adding more enemies throughout the game ramping up to the nighttime chapters. And at first, it's kind of a cute diversion, unexpectedly having to worry about mid-game enemies in an early game area. But then the game just keeps spamming these goblins for no reason! There's never any attempt to explain who the goblins are, or why they're here, or why they're so aggressive, or anything like that. In Bad Fur Day, they were used super sparingly, enough so that you didn't really question it, just accepting these weirdos as part of the tapestry of this misanthropic game world. If they were more pronounced in Bad Fur Day, doubtless the game would have a joke overexplaining their presence - but they show up in like two places, so, no need for that. Here, they're everywhere in the daytime, then completely abandoned at night, replaced very briefly by haunted dolls before the game ultimately decides to dispense with extra enemies all together. It honestly makes the game feel like a low-effort ROMhack, where the hacker couldn't be assed to change up the levels and instead just added more enemies into the standard levels. And tightened up the graphics a little bit, sure.

Xbox Live & Co is okay. Anything replacing Bad Fur Day's excellent, varied multiplayer is a bummer as a matter of course, but Xbox Live & Co is... fine. Probably better back in its heyday, and doing an exhibition run of it in singleplayer is kinda lame, but I can see where potential would come from with this. Sneeker and Sky Jockey felt like the only two particularly fun classes on first blush, but maybe the others feel better with more practice. I don't know that it adds a ton, embellishing the Professor as a threat (and giving him a rude name) as well as bringing back the Panther King, but it is something. I feel like there's the start of it being a decent commentary on the then-burgeoning modern military squad-based shooter, but there just isn't enough there for it to be more than a few decent jokes/references. Or maybe I'm just the wrong audience, with my competitive shooter experience being with Battlefield 1942/Vietnam/2?

I think Live & Reloaded would've been acceptable if it had a follow-up, or if it had gone all-in on a more expansive multiplayer. As it is, it's trying to take a weirdly auteur project, filter it down to Microsoft's standards, then build it back up as a competitive shooter. I guess it's still a broadly equivalent experience, and if this was the only way you played it... I mean, it'd be all right. But I don't think it'd be anything special, which is the most damning thing.

To shoot the obvious elephant in the room right out of the gate: yes I think the additional bleeping on a lot the swearing is stupid, especially when the majority of the swearing in the N64 version was uncensored besides the F bombs. That being said I’d happily play this over the original version purely because the last third is borderline unplayable with the dated shooting controls. That goes doubly so if you’re playing it through Rare Replay with the respective controls mapped to their equivalent position on a modern Xbox controller. I wasn’t even intending to play this version from the get-go, I just eventually went “fuck it” and played through the remainder of what I had in the N64 version just so I could manage the final 3 levels without popping another blood vessel.

With that out of the way, I honestly think this games a little overrated, though not to an extreme extent like other media I’ve watched/played before. (if you know, you know) The writing while being rather hit or miss mostly lands 20 years later, though certain movie parodies feel very of the time and not in a good way, especially the drawn out Matrix segment towards the end.

While Conker mostly succeeds in the writing department, it often falls flat in what is arguably the most important aspect: the gameplay. While only a few segments are straight up awful, majority of the game is just tolerable at best.

Fortunately thanks to the refined controls this mostly dissipated during the last third given that the shooting controls aren’t, y’know, a horribly dated crock of shit. It’s still annoying how you have to infrequently switch between shooter gameplay and really precise platforming, but it’s still a bit more bearable now. Ironically though I feel like this is where the writing takes a bit of a nosedive, or at least I would say that except I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the ending. It’s weirdly somber for a game that mostly plays as an immature farce, and while I’m all for a good shake up of my expectations when done right, I honestly can’t gather what the devs were going for.

So uh, yeah. I’m kinda disappointed to be honest. After years of hearing all the hype behind this with some even considering it Rare’s magnum opus, I’m honestly kinda underwhelmed. It wasn’t horrible by any means, but it’s far from reaching the highs of other titles I’ve first played this year. Hell even the best comedic moments don’t compare to the likes of Monty Python and the Holy Grail or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I really hope this isn’t gonna be the standard with the other Rare titles I’m hoping to play soon, or else I’m probably in for a bad time.

N64 version: 6/10
Xbox version: 7/10

Aside from the censor swear words and the graphics not having the same charm as the N64 version this is still "in my opinion" the best way to play Conkers Bad Fur Day. Mostly since its gameplay isn't fucking garbage. The WW2 level in the N64 version was almost unplayable at times with how awful the controls were, now I can actually finish it with this new addition called "quality of life changes".

Yeah, it sucks that it doesn't have the same art style as the original, but I can look past it since it still has the same writing; which was the highlight of the N64 version. But for real if your gonna write off a whole game just because a bunch of swear words are being censored then I don't know what to say.
Swear words are not inherently funny by themselves; it's all context and timing, this game still has the context and the timing so the joke is still funny but now you don't get the hear "The Fuck Word".

That's like writing off a remaster of DMC because Dante's jacket was purple, it's such an inconsequential aspect of the whole project.

Upon release, people lamented that the N64 multiplayer modes were better than this version. They were right, but this game's multiplayer was really good too. I can't wait for Insignia to revive the multiplayer of this game. It deserves to be played.

Apparently, you can play this on Xbox Series consoles. It's worth the $10 bucks to experience a good port of a great game.

Or pirate it. I don't give a fuck.

The undisputed good this game pulls off is that it redeems a lot of the original's clunky controls. Having full camera control is a God send; yet even smaller details like adding an aiming reticle to the Context Pad Projectiles, or redesigning the melee system, vastly improve this game's playability.

But what's missing is a lot of the game's soul. No I don't mean I'm upset that they censored swears. I'm talking about the moment to moment character stuff, where the models are more "detailed" but somehow have lost their Looney Tune inspired expressiveness. Character's eyes don't bug out the way they did for comical effect, small details in the cutscrnes have been removed (like the Barn Boys's executioner masks), along with a whole lot of other subtractions that just take away from what felt so unique about the N64 original.

Online multiplayer is dead so I have no idea if that was a benefit to this upon release. This is just a...curiosity I guess? It's better to PLAY than the original, but slightly worse to experience.

Spoiler alert for those of you who haven't played this or Bad Fur Day.

Okay. I was a bit harsh with the game before, but it's honestly really good. A lot of my biggest problems with the original have been fixed in this version, like the Goddamn shooting controls.

However, I am not really sure why Rare felt the need to bleep out words like "shit", "fuck", "fellatio", "twat", and even "asshole" in an M-rated game. Not only that, but why is "asshole" so much worse than "ass"? Is "twat" really that bad? It's not like they're saying "cunt". This does't even really bug me. It just confuses me.

Plus, the censoring is so poor that you can clearly tell what the characters are saying. They only beep out the middle of the word, so can clearly tell that the Haybot is saying "asshole".

The original idea for the game was actually a fully uncensored version of the N64 game, which would've been called Conker: Live & Uncut, but I guess Microsoft didn't like that idea because all Xbox games are completely family-friendly (except Goat Simulator, South Park: The Stick Of Truth, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Halo: Infinite, Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, Gears 5, Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, South Park: The Fractured But Whole, Call Of Duty: Vanguard, Goat Simulator 3, The Walking Dead: Season 1, Grand Theft Auto IV, etc.)

However, this game is still really good. It's mostly just the little changes that help to make this game so much better. In Bad Fur Day's Sloprano, you need to throw SIX pieces of sweet corn into the diarrhea river to make The Great Mighty Poo to appear, but in Live & Reloaded, you only need three.

Another thing that this remake does a hell of a lot better is the music. Now, don't get me wrong, I like the original's soundtrack, but I LOVE the remake's soundtrack. Unlike the original, which just uses MIDI files, Conker: Live & Reloaded uses real instruments, which makes the music sound so much better.

They even made changes to existing tracks to make them better, like Surf Punks and Mad Pitchfork. Speaking of which, Surf Punks is my favorite track in the whole game. It fucking slaps. I often replay that section of the game just for the music.

The Barn Boys version of Windy now uses real banjos and fiddles and harmonicas and it sounds fucking amazing. Sloprano (The Great Mighty Poo) sounds absolutely incredible with real instruments and you can even find it uncensored pretty easily online.

Also, while the remake censors a lot more swearing than the original, the remake is WAY more violent. Scenes like Berri's death and the electric chair are extended, so we see a lot more blood. And in the electric chair scene, the soldier's EYE pops out of its SOCKET. Jesus Christ. I would NOT wanna be THAT rodent.

So, a soldier's eye popping out of his head and catfish being brutally ripped apart are perfectly fine as long as they don't use any naughty words.

Also, Sloprano adds a scene in the dung beetle's flashback where the Great Mighty Poo flips him off and they didn't censor it, so that's pretty neat. 🖕 Right back at ya, bitch.

Now for the animations. The animations in this game are pretty much 95.2% identical to Bad Fur Day's animations. However, the animations sometimes don't look that great with Live & Reloaded's new visual style. Some of the lip-syncing is fixed, such as the scene with the foul-mouthed cog, but every single character has eyes that don't ever move.

In many ways this is an impressive remake and I wouldn't be totally baffled to hear someone who considers it better than the original. The graphics are incredibly ahead of their time. The graphical jump from N64 to the OG xbox in just 4 years time is actually amazing. The visuals would have held up well even being a late Xbox360 game let alone during the ps2/gamecube era. That said the visuals do have some drawbacks. The more realistic look somewhat undermines the fact that the game's meant to be a parody of stuff like Banjo Kazooie. And the animation work especially in the cutscenes, is much stiffer. Characters are much less expressive. Dialogue is also excessively censored for some reason. Wild it's Microsoft that got cold feet over this game and not Nintendo. I'm someone who often finds the bleeps funnier than the actual swear would have been, the OG game got this perfectly. But they went way overboard on this one.

Another thing that's a positive but a double edged sword anyway...A lot of quality of life improvements were made. You can now strafe while holding your melee weapons, so you'll have no trouble smacking keys or cheese or whatever else you need to grab by knocking it out first. All projectiles now have a reticle and a more modern control scheme to boot. But personally I find there's legitimate value to "dated" game design concepts. For example the aiming reticle. Before when you're throwing toilet paper, you have to get a feel for it and hitting your shots feels like you're genuinely aiming in a relatively realistic way, and it's satisfying to do well. Same goes for the slingshot and knife throwing. But now that there's a reticle I really feel like all gameplay is gone, it's merely moving the reticle over your target and nothing more. The N64 wasn't incapable of having reticles, they literally use them for guns and such in the later half. I can't say I ever thought toilet paper throwing should have one. And on a similar note, now that you can strafe, 100% of the gameplay revolved around hitting anything before it runs away is entirely undermined, making it no longer satisfying in the slightest. Makes me think of this joke LIST by user chandler. The joke being how not uncommon it is for people to disregard the essence of what makes a game good just because it doesn't follow modern conventional standards. Following this design philosophy of updating "outdated" mechanics may technically make a game "better" to play, but it removes wrinkles in the gameplay, flattens it out into a more predictable experience.

And while they were at it they added this new enemy type. It's not something you really notice but the original didn't really have enemies roaming around that weren't relevant to the current mission. But I guess they figured it would be worth adding since they went through the effort of ruining fixing your melee attack. And idk they're just weird additions that don't add much. Sections that were perfectly fine without them now want you to stop and fight the same enemy for the 6th time.

But yeah glad it exists, I'll always take multiple versions of the same game, that's just something I'm always interested in. But besides the novelty of just how well the graphics hold up, I'd rather play the original.