Bear and bird are back in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts! Rare seem to have some vague idea what they're doing when it comes to making games, at least by the metric of selling jillions of copies. Nuts and Bolts is more than just a simple follow-on adventure for the famous bear'n'bird duo though, with the game taking the interesting new direction of allowing players to build their own vehicles to solve challenges in the game (kind of like Meccano).

Quick story overview - The Lord of the Games has built a series of game worlds for a contest between Banjo and the evil witch Gruntilda, with each world offering new challenges. You unlock new game worlds by collecting jiggies - little puzzle pieces - which you collect by completing the challenges in the various game worlds. Along the way you'll unlock and uncover various pieces of equipment you can use to build and customise your vehicles.

An example puzzle we were shown was a simple jumping challenge - try to get your vehicle to fly as far as possible off a jumping ramp. The first vehicle demonstrated didn't go very far, so our host from Rare fired up the vehicle editor and showed off some of the things you'll do to try to solve these challenges.

The vehicle editor is amazing. At first glance it seems complicated - there are a bunch of different components and you'll need to learn how they work and interact. Our host loaded an almost-completed new vehicle - a blocky thing with a cylinder attached to the front - and showed us how you can attach a certain type of component to join the cylinder part to the blocky part; allowing the cylinder to be detached. From there, he loaded this vehicle into the challenge, did the jump, and when we hit the peak speed of the combined vehicle, he hit the detach button, the cylinder blew off and then rolled - almost doubling the distance of the previous attempt.

This was (apparently) a pretty simple challenge, but several alternative solutions exist for each one - none of them pre-defined. The only limit is your imagination and the thousands of different vehicles you can make from the upwards of 100 different components on offer for vehicle modification. You can even modify vehicles mid-challenge - rearranging and moving components, not adding new ones - to find multi-step solutions.

There's a replay system that will allow the best solutions to the challenges to be made available on Xbox Live. The hope is that this'll encourage users to keep trying to beat everyone's scores on each challenge, but it'll also probably serve to help out people that are stuck on certain challenges by giving them some new strategies.

Eight-player multiplayer is planned, with a variety of different game modes. And you can take part in either social matches (just for fun) or ranked matches to see how you fare against all the other Banjoers out there. There're a few other neat bits and pieces in multiplayer - like the ability to steal the blueprints for someone's vehicle design by sneaking Banjo out and taking a photo of it, James Bond style! (this is Rare, after all).

The environment is massive, beautiful and colourful - everything you'd expect from a Rare title. Even though it's a few months away from completion it's already showing a lot of polish, and it can presumably only get better. Somehow.

The demo we had was pretty short and only really scratched the surface of the game, but it looks like an intriguing mix of action and puzzle solving. The flexibility on offer in the vehicle design, the simplicity of its use and the temptation to constantly try and improve your scores on challenges, all fuse together to create a package that looks like it will appeal to a huge number of people. It's the sort of game you could happily play by yourself for hours, or sit down with your family and play through together; taking it in turns to attempt the myriad of challenge on offer.

Be sure to check out our Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts! game page for all related media and information.