as someone who adored Banjo and Kazooie, i was cautiously optimistic for this one. it seemed like a good idea, having ex rareware devs work on a spiritual successor to BJ. but to me it always looked like they were just copying it, the box art, the design of everything, and that turned me off. i then gave it a chance and yeah it was just good. the controls feels almost great the design looks almost great, and the gameplay feels almost great, but i just hate how it feels like its just copying an already great game, like why would i play this over BJ if its just BJ but a bit worse? however this game is great for kids. i can imagine 6 year olds mastering this game and loving it, but overall this game just needs a sequel that polishes everything.

From Playtonic Games, a company made partially of Rare staff that worked on Banjo-Kazooie, comes a spiritual sequel to Banjo-Kazooie, with a similar platforming style, name and humour.

Yooka-Laylee is comprised of five levels, which start off small and expand as you collect more pagies. You will unlock more moves and find new transformations in each level, although one segment in particular doesn’t telegraph very well that you’ll need a move from a later level and lets you traverse a maze before encountering something you can’t pass at the end.

That said, the platforming is very challenging, with some good puzzles. Bosses are mostly fun – although the first was frustrating until the camera was fixed in a later update. Yooka’s kind words and Laylee’s rude sassiness are both charming to read, with the classic Banjo-style “grunt voices”.

I'm so glad much of the Banjo-Kazooie team was able to get back together, but I don't think they were able to recreate what they had before. To be fair, the team had an idea they were working towards, and eventually the player is able to "get" what Playtonic was going for, after which point the game experience improves considerably. Even so - the game reads like such a rough first draft at a Banjo-Kazooie spiritual successor so as to be incomparable.

If I were to describe the game in one word, it'd be "sterile". This is due to the game's use of Unity as its engine. Ignoring Unity Technologies' recent string of questionable-at-best business practices, their game engine is perfectly fine; actually, my class used it exclusively for our senior projects in my game design program in college. Out-of-the-box, Unity is a basic but serviceable engine, with a lot of focus on modular physics due to its easy integration with programming scripts. Unity by its nature heavily emphasizes drag-and-drop programming, which makes it a good learning tool and a solid choice for indie devs.

The consequence of this design is that it's very easy for games to feel samey if little is done to differentiate them. Yooka-Laylee leans into a fairly stock suite of physics, texturing, and especially lighting systems that exist within Unity. I'm not saying that I've made a game like Yooka-Laylee, but I am saying that I've played enough student projects thrown together in Unity that Yooka-Laylee doesn't stand out. Naturally, for a game duology as vibrant and creative and unique as Banjo-Kazooie/Banjo-Tooie, it's reeeeeeally disheartening to see that Playtonic either didn't know how to make a stock engine feel unique, or they chose not to do so. I think the most generous read is that they simply lacked confidence in this, their first big statement as an indie company.

If this is all too technical for you, think about it like this. Yooka has the ability to take on different elemental properties by licking things. For example, by licking cannonballs, Yooka becomes metallic and becomes too heavy to be gusted about. This is similar to Metal Mario from Super Mario 64, of course. But in Mario 64, Metal Mario's physical properties are somewhat altered: he can't swim, a loud metallic sound accompanies his walking, and his jump height is impacted. Metal Yooka has no change in physical properties; when Yooka moves around, he moves as lightly and effortlessly as he normally does. The only thing that's different is that his model's texture changes - a purely superficial effect that is easy to program into the game. Many of the design decisions made in Yooka-Laylee are like this.

I think I could qualify a lot of my miscellaneous critiques of the game this way, as products of developers not confident in what they were doing. Capital B is a lowest common denominator version of Gruntilda. Many sound effects, shockingly, are stock and limp. The game reaches for a prolonged fart joke with Buddy Bubble, which I guess is comparable to Kazooie's Ass Egg, but Banjo-Kazooie at least had the good sense not to underline it in dialogue. The Snowplow transformation is presented as being fleshy rather than metallic because that seemingly would've taken effort. Dr. Quack's quiz sequences feel like they're there out of obligation rather than a genuine passion for stuff like Furnace Fun. A lot of the NPCs feel like Playtonic's punching down, particularly the shopping cart homeless stereotypes...

...so let us instead look to what Yooka-Laylee does well. Soundtrack is of course good, with Grant Kirkhope and David Wise at the helm; I do find the melodies unmemorable, but they're good atmospheric compositions. The core stand-in NPCs like Trowser for Bottles and Dr. Puzz for Mumbo are cute enough. Shovel Knight is always fun to see as a cameo character. You can sort-of tell that the team developed each new level in sequence, so by the time we get to Capital Cashino and Galleon Galaxy, the levels start to feel tight and well-realized. I actually quite like the Kartos sequences, and I especially like that they're tied into a boss fight. Even though I don't care for Capital B, his boss fight does the "test all the mechanics" thing I love to see in video games. Icymetric Palace represents a considerable amount of effort and creativity which adds a ton to the experience...

Finally, there's Flappy Flight. You unlock flight in this game late compared to Banjo-Kazooie, but it becomes apparent why: unlike in B-K, Flappy Flight is not gated to context-sensitive pads and is instead useable at any point in time. Suddenly, the game's huuuuuuge levels make sense - it's incredibly low-commitment to travel from one corner of a given world to another, and particularly to do so quickly. Part of what makes Capital Cashino and Galleon Galaxy so effective is that their designs lean into this philosophy, and so the bigass levels become manageable playgrounds operating on hub-and-spoke design. For that matter, backtracking into previous levels becomes much more tolerable, to the point where I'd urge the player to stave off the obligatory revisits as long as they can until they have free flight. This does, in some way, break the intended game design, but it also makes it fun to run around as these characters, which I would argue is far more important to this game.

I do think there's potential with Yooka-Laylee as a series revival. There are ideas at play there, and I think something really interesting is waiting to be teased out. I do suspect that we're not likely to see it at this point. Impossible Lair went in a separate direction (though I understand that game's actually quite excellent), and Yooka & Laylee have mostly just served cameo roles since then. Bit of a shame, but if Playtonic has something up their sleeves, I'm curious to see how they do. As for this game? I think I'm content with my one and only playthrough.

The first time I played Yooka Laylee was on the games release date of March 2017. At that moment I was disappointed in the game, but still walked away feeling good about it and thinking that it was still solid enough, but not really ever having the drive to go back to it. After 7 years and multiple performance patches, what would I think? Would I like it more? Less? Feel the same? Unfortunately, I'm left liking this game even less on this 2nd go around. The reason for this In my opinion is that I know the crew at Playtonic Games are incredibly talented people bursting with creativity, and while I commend them for being able to develop a crowd funded Indie 3D Platformer in only 2 years, the things that don't work really don't work and make it really feel like the team was resting on their laurels a bit hoping their pedigree would carry them enough. On one hand, there are some great additions to this game that I feel not only expand upon the Banjo series, but improve on them as well. You've got small QOL stuff like a button on the pause screen that immediately saves all your progress in a world and returns you to the hub world, as well as changing the way you move learns where you can learn them all in one spot instead of having to comb over the whole world for them. Then there are things like the Ghost Writers, the games Jinjo equivalent which I VERY MUCH prefer here to Banjo. Having 5 in a world, but having the collection of them be a puzzle in itself is a great twist. Some do just let you grab them, but others will run away, turn invisible, attack you, or even require you to feed them before grabbing them. It just adds a better flavor of variety than the Jinjos ever did. Hopefully they can be expanded upon in the sequel. All these improvements just make some of these other negatives all the more aggravating, and unfortunately a big one has to do with the cast of characters themselves. Now most of the main cast is great. Yooka and Laylee are a little too simple and a tad bland, but work. Trowzer, Capital B, Dr. Quack, Dr Puzz, and Rextro are all fantastic and really add a lot of liveliness to everything. It's the side characters that are pretty boring. You still have some good ones in there like Clara the skeleton explorer, Planker the signpost, and Schell the Space Witch, but all others are so incredibly unremarkable and unmemorbale that you can toss them all out. None of them make any impression whatsoever and sometimes feel like their clashing with the style of the game. Most of the 5 worlds also suffer from the expansion mechanic, where you can choose to make the world bigger to find more challenges and items. There's never a reason to not do this immediately since you'll definitely need to expand in order to get enough Paiges to get into the final showdown, but this also leads to another problem with most of the worlds. They're simply not interesting or fun. The 2 good standouts are Glitterglaze Glacier and Galleon Galaxy. Both make great use of their world space and themeing to make them an enjoyable experience. The other 3 worlds aren't as lucky though as they all suffer from big empty spaces and the same enemy types repeated at nauseum. The games musical note equivalent, Quills, aren't placed half as well as the notes in Banjo and more often than not feel like they were just randomly tossed on the top of a couple of rocks, or underneath a ramp. There's very little cohesion in it all. The last big problems have to do with their stretch goal minigames. Rextros Arcade and Kartos Minecart Chalenges to put it simplay are not fun. They lack any real replay value outside of your initial quests with them in each world, and specifically with Kartos have their challenges become more and more annoying as the game progresses. I personally wouldnt shed a tear if they decided Kartos was to be melted down into pure sheet metal, but I do think they should keep Rextro, but just change his profession. Hes a fun character with a lame challenge attatched to him. I am interested in seeing if they can work through a lot of these issues to make the sequel a better time. If it ever even arrives at this point. They've already proven with 2019's Impossible Lair that they can take the criticisms at them and use that to make a better product. With all that said, I still hope there's a bright future for Playtonic and Yooka Laylee.

This game....yikes. Before the final boss, I was going to be kind and say this title is average with much needed polishing.

Through the majority of my time, I generally enjoyed the game. It has problems but I was trying to get passed that with the game's charm. The graphics are fun. I love the bright colors. I love the character designs for Yooka and Laylee. I like that you can eat berries and get powers.

Some of the puzzles were enjoyable. The level designs were fun to explore and the DNA ray was hilarious in each level.

But $%^&*@!&, the controls are abominable. The boss fights are not fun. The minigames were...okay at most. Awful other times. The arcade games...just why. You have to play them twice. They're so long and dull.

The final fight is what absolutely killed the game for me. I do NOT recommend this game even without chasing every achievement BECAUSE of the final boss fight required to beat the game. I really, really wanted to like this game. I was trying to enjoy myself past its shortcomings. It just did not hold up.

The fight was incredibly unfair with terrible game controls. (In 2017 how in TF do you have a game with no healing, no checkpoint between boss phases, or even a boss health bar?) Play something like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, or hell even a turn based RPG for a rewarding boss fight. Not this garbage. You want to play a game with collectibles? They exist. You want a game with 90s feel? Play the Spyro or Crash Bandicoot trilogies. But FFS not this title. I was letdown with this one. Please, just pick something else up.

Sights & Sounds
- The game looks fantastic. The visuals are very similar to (but maybe a slight step down from) the Spyro remake's
- The environments are really well-crafted. The 5th world is especially unique and interesting. Looking at the achievement percentages, it's a shame that the majority of people who played this game haven't seen it
- The sound design is very faithful to the classic that this game pays homage to: Banjo-Kazooie. This is especially true of the music. You'll even see Grant Kirkhope's name in the credits
- One minor gripe is the "voice acting". It's just as annoying and ear-grating as it was when I was an 11 year old kid playing Banjo-Kazooie

Story & Vibes
- As you might expect from a 3D character platformer that harkens back to a late-90's aesthetic, there's not much of a story. There's mostly just a set-up for you to collect macguffins
- Given the cartoonish visuals, you'd be correct in assuming that the vibes are laid-back and silly. There's nothing serious going on in this game

Playability & Replayability
- Like Banjo-Kazooie, this game leans heavily on collectathon mechanics. While I appreciate that those often motivate exploration, it always devolves into tedium
- You'll be seeking out these collectables, particularly "pagies", throughout 5 sprawling environments and the similarly large overworld that connects them
- You'll also be fighting the camera every step of the way. It has an annoying habit of getting stuck on level geometry outside your field of view, frequently resulting in falling off of platforms and getting hit by enemies
- That said, the level design and puzzles are frequently impressive. You can see that a lot of love and labor went into those
- There's a surprisingly large number of skills you'll have to learn and utilize carefully to traverse each environment and defeat each boss
- Speaking of bosses, there's 6 in total. Unfortunately, there's a noticeable difficulty spike after the third one. The last 3 are honestly brutal for various reasons (perspective, controls, and duration)
- To unlock the final boss, you'll have to collect 100 pagies. Don't hesitate to go back to older worlds once you unlock all the skills. There are some pretty easy ones to be had that make reaching that total only slightly annoying

Overall Impressions & Performance
- My wife was interested in playing this one since she thought it looked cute, so we passed the controller back and forth between pagies. It was pretty fun at first, but it really began to drag during the 4th world
- The game ran exceptionally well and there weren't any notable bugs, but note that it's not impossible to get stuck in small crevices in level geometry. Just pause and return to the hub if this happens

Final Verdict
- 6.5/10. Soft recommend. I largely found collecting things to be a chore. Exploration doesn't feel good when you're constantly battling the camera and already know that you're just going to find the same damn collectable at end of any given path. Still, the quality is evident in the visuals, sounds, puzzles, and level design. I don't have any specific nostalgia for Banjo-Kazooie outside of the music, so maybe I'm viewing the game through the wrong lens

When i first played Yooka-Laylee back when it released, i was so in love. The game felt so much like Rare was BACK, and they were ready to make games like these again. But after 100%ing it and letting it sick in, i realized that the game was so bloated with such boring characters and concepts. A lot of the pagies are collected by hitting a button and jumping through rings within a time limit. Bosses felt very dry as well, they all felt like set pieces rather than characters who you'll remember for something. I would want to say that i'd give Playtonic Games another shot if they made a new game, but they've been so focused on publishing (nothing technically wrong with that) that it doesn't seem like anything will be made again.

ok, look

Was this game ultimately disappointing? sure; I'd be lying if I said that wasn't the case

However, did I still find some things to appreciate about this game, namely the fact that it was an almost shameless love letter to one of my favorite games ever? yes

It could've been executed better, nobody's denying that, but there were definitely points that sent me straight back to 1999 and having nothing else better to do with my time, so, honestly, I don't think I could hate it on virtue of that fact alone

3 stars is likely over-rating it, but dammit, I'm just thankful it exists...hopefully the sequel can take a reverse Banjo Tooie and improve upon what's already there