If copycats are the finest form of compliment, then Epic Games’ gunmetal grime would be tenfold the worth of Rare’s cartoony colour. But contrary to Gears of War’s replicable machismo, Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts’ keen sense of humour is an industry one-off – dealing in distinct dry wit while others brood.

Yet Rare’s problem has never been one of style. Rather, it’s what to do with an inheritance of old game design that’s grown obsolete. Granted, a show of hands among seminal cartoony mascots reveals only one, Super Mario, still revelling in that sole mechanic of hop, anticipate and jump. The rest need refitting, and Banjo – dug up after a decade and looking for success in a new console space – has been tricked out in spades.

Nuts & Bolts relinquishes former series basics for the seemingly greener pastures of experimentation; namely, testing the waters of player-generated content by letting you cobble together vehicles that fly, float and everything in between. The main mechanic is nothing like it once was; trading stomping bear feet for propellers and rolling wheels.

A racer at its heart, task completion rests entirely on what you craft, and the game is at its best when the toolset is ripe and the method is vague. And yet, although creativity is championed, the insincerity of an old mentality, “get twenty of X to pass through door Y”, is anomalous when applied to Nuts & Bolts’ construction set.

Creative potential is ceilinged at the outset, forcing you down an ancient, meaningless grind for vehicle parts. Rare’s piecemeal pace gives you bits and bobs of what will eventually become a robust game, but even when you get there the long trek feels no more purposed.

Showdown Town, the game’s hubworld, too, takes this archaic structuring to heart through enforcing obligatory sequences of dryly carpooling quest items from spot to spot. Nuts & Bolts pushes new ideas on old legs, and it gives a sense that Rare is at something of a loss when it comes to ripping entirely away from a past that impinges the present. The game is padded, putting weight on collect-a-thons when the real fun’s to be had in fitting pieces of the kit together in imaginatively useful ways.

If last year’s LittleBigPlanet showed potential in setting players on the loose, then Nuts & Bolts is emblematic of an opposite, equally viable method of careful constraint. Like Media Molecule’s platforming levels, a vehicle can be completed in literally a thousand different ways and Rare works the blanks best when there’s just enough creative push, while also a grounded pull.

But the touch isn’t always sound. In battle with Gruntilda, Banjo’s hag nemesis, you’re nudged to load your car up with gats, guns and ammo – with eggs and bursts of colour, it’s the most endearing gunplay this side of Ratchet and Clank. However, the toolset hasn’t been kept in check with the objective, and a few well placed blasts end the mission in a mess of shrapnel before it gets the chance to truly begin. It’s this kind of oddity that faults Rare’s focus on inflation when less proves to be so much more.

In a stage titled Log Box 720, a disarray of wires constituting the high tech jumbling of a future console, Banjo has to drive, float or fly around to put out electrical fires caused by nasty hardware malfunction. It’s this perfectly witted self-deprecation and pointed mission structure coming together that makes Nuts & Bolts shine. Shame, then, that the overstuffed frame tends to render those instances a little too rare.