Before reviewing, i wann say that you can still play this game online to this day with third party services like Xlink Kai and Insignia Live, so if you wanna play this game online again join our community on Discord: https://discord.gg/conker

The game is overhated, yes it has its weird decisions like more censoring and the animations being not as expresive or well done as the N64 version and of course the polemic multiplayer change, but overall gameplay was improved specially in the shooting aspect and some game design choices in the story mode. I personally don't think this game replaces the original N64 version but i would recommend this game if you never played this classic before unless you really want to experience the original game which you will have to deal with some outdated controls and gameplay mechanics. For those who already played the N64 version before, you really should give it a try to experience it again.

Also the Multiplayer is a whole different game, you can play the game only for this, is classed based like Team Fortress 2 with different game modes (depends on the map) but since Xbox Live services are gone the whole experiences is reduced to play with bots or with the online community that hosts sessions and events.

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.

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.

El juego gana a la vez que pierde, gana a nivel jugable bastante, el nivel de los tedies es mucho mas concreto a la hora de jugar, y a la hora de disparar, el juego mejora mucho, a su vez pone varios de estos enemigos de bola para hacer el recorrido un tanto más interesante, aunque no sé quién fue el boludo que se le ocurrió que con 6 golpes (que solo es alejarse, acercarse y golpear, sin mucho más) y no lo dejo en 3 golpes, sin embargo pierde en estilo y carisma.

El hecho de que lo hicieran más "oscuro" quita los contrastes de las paletas de colores de la 64 con el tono del juego, los nuevos modelos tienen menos expresividad y los tedies se los cargaron con ese diseño genérico, donde en el de 64 daban un ambiente mucho más arido aunque tuviera colores más vivos, hacia su ambientación extraordinaria, aquí se cargaron esa sensación con ese rediseño (aunque de resto sigue siendo competente ya que era en si, el nivel más gris del juego haciendo que en ese aspecto, no pierda mucho, cosa que si pasa en el resto del juego, los modelos de los Pedrolos o del gran cavernícola son mucho menos propios, y al entrar a la discoteca el ambiente es muy ehh, aburrido en comparación al de 64, cuando las abejas te persiguen no se siente esa presión como en el de 64, y el great mighty poo, le jodieron un poco con esa censura aunque la reverberación y unos cambios instrumentales de hecho me gusta más los sonidos en este en la batalla a nivel musical, pero no tanto a nivel de voz.

De resto, los mismos haciertos y problemaa del juego original, que en si me gusta mucho, pero aún con las mejoras jugables, creo que el carisma del original hace que lo prefiera más.

A remake of Conker’s Bad Fur Day, I was curious to see how different they feel. In terms of the crazy plot, rude dialogue and all that, it feels the same. This version does have more censored words, but I didn’t find it impacted much anyway. It’s still clear what is being said, and a lot of swear words in the original were bleeped out anyway. To some, this was the biggest issue with the remake, but I don’t feel like it’s anywhere near as important as some make out.

In terms of improvements, you have the much nicer looking graphics, and the fur effects still look great even today. Everything not only looks more detailed, but the entire world feels more colourful. The controls also feel much more responsive, along with a better camera. For the platformer parts of the game, it’s similar but just nicer to play.

Live & Reloaded has more lenient checkpoints as well, and when you run out of lives, you can simply continue from the most recent checkpoint. This does make lives pointless, but also removes the need to replay some sections for no good reason. I think the lives were mainly left in due to the wonderful Gregg the Grim Reaper, and the “game over” cutscene.

One change that I wasn’t too keen on were the added enemies. I think this would be fine if they were more varied, but entirely all of them are creatures in metal buckets that have spikes that come out. Each one takes five hits, so each time you encounter one you whack it, run backwards and repeat. The haunted section of the game adds some wonderful creepy dolls (although oddly there’s a few randomly in the earlier barn level), so more enemies that fit each area would have been much better.

The later levels – the war and heist sections – were more shooting sections and have been completely overhauled, and play like a pretty good modern 3rd person shooter. This gameplay is the basis for the game’s multiplayer (which can be played split screen and with bots, so you can still try it even though the servers are down).

While it has a few problems, I think that if you want to try out Conker’s Bad Fur Day, pick Live & Reloaded as it’s much nicer to play.