Conker's career has been nothing if not turbulent. After his debut as a guest star in Diddy Kong Racing, his first standalone game would be the oft-forgotten Conker's Pocket Tales. A game that—even without comparing it to Conker's console adventure—just has nothing going for it.
Conker is a happy lil' squirrel, living it up with his girlfriend Berri in their forest home. Today happens to be Conker's birthday, but alas! Disaster strikes! A villain known as Evil Acorn steals all of Conker's presents and kidnaps Berri for good measure.
It's said that Conker's Pocket Tales was meant to evoke the adventurous feeling of the early Zelda titles, but that's overselling the experience methinks. The actual goal of the game is to explore its isometric levels in search of your missing presents. These are hidden all over the game's world alongside other collectibles. Usually requiring that you solve some kind of puzzle, use a certain item or skill, or partake in a mini-game to get them. While doing so you'll frequently encounter enemies and other hazards that Conker must either avoid or defeat with his own attacks.
What killed my enthusiasm for the game right away is just how uninspired it feels in every regard. Like everything in the game is a placeholder that was meant to be replaced with something interesting down the line. Characters devoid of personality, a soulless "fantasy" world, ugly sprite art, it's all so below-par. Even the gameplay suffers from this, with many of its challenges being your basic switch or block-pushing puzzles. There's nothing to feel excited over, so what's your motivation to play this over any other game available to you? Even if there are a handful of interesting activities later down the line, who is going to play through the first hour of this and still want to see more?
To make matters worse, a layer of jank permeates the entire game. A clumsiness that is particularly felt during the more action-centered moments of Conker's Pocket Tales. Running, for example, is usually a quick way to get yourself damaged. You move so fast relative to the tiny size of the screen that you won't have time to react when enemies appear and instantly launch their attacks.
Retaliating against these enemies is a world of pain in and of itself. Conker's attacks have pathetically little range and are slow to pull off, especially the groundpound. You have to get so close to the enemy that the slightest misjudgement in timing will get Conker damaged instead. You do get some better tools for dealing with enemies down the line, but these have their own drawbacks and associated jank.
Unpolished, uninteresting, uninspired; there's a lot un-words that can be applied to Conker's Pocket Tales. To its credit, the game is sizable owing to its large world and plenty of content. Even so, I wouldn't recommend Conker's Pocket Tales to anyone but the most die-hard Rare or Conker fans. Not that many would care to play much of the game considering the dismal first impression it leaves.
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