Yooka-Laylee was a game I backed the Kickstarter for and was fairly excited about, but then, as I do with all the Kickstarter games I back, wasn't quite in the mood to play it when it came out :P . It was toted as a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie made by many of the same team who made the originals, but it received VERY mixed reviews upon release (like, not just middling, usually either stunning or condemning ones). I finally got around to beating it yesterday, and it was about as mediocre as I'd heard it was. I went into it with an open mind, very ready to enjoy it, but while the writing is often quite funny and the world and character designs are aesthetically right on the money, there are some core design decisions that are just fundamentally bad. It took me around 11 hours to beat getting juuust over 100 Pagies. I wanted to get them all at first, but I didn't even play the final world because I was so ready for the game to just be over XP
The game controls just fine. I never had any problems getting Yooka and Laylee to go where I wanted them to or go where I wanted them to go because of how they move. The bigger problem here is the camera and world design. The levels have a very unpolished feel to them that comes mostly from how basically ALL terrain is climbable if it has an edge, meaning you can go tons of places, sometimes entirely around puzzles, with even the slightest look-around. This is absolutely ruined at the end of the game where they give you the power of nearly unrestricted anywhere-flying, like Banjo-Kazooie had in its early prototypes, but they couldn't get balanced properly so they took out, and it ruins this game just like it would've ruined that one. The engine feels very ill-designed for a game like this with how caught on the tight scenery the camera can get and how easily scale-able EVERYTHING you can see is. The way the flying effectively destroys the rest of the game's jumping puzzles is just a cherry on the sundae on top of the other worst design choice: World expansion.
Instead of having 10 worlds, Yooka-Laylee has 5 that you expand after first unlocking them. Roughly half of the collectibles in each world are stuck behind this expansion that expands the map and makes everything bigger, but this mechanic just plain sucks. New quills (the notes of this games) or Pagies will be sometimes where the old world already existed, meaning you effectively need to retrace your steps around the ENTIRE world to make sure you haven't missed anything. Put this on top of how the first 3 worlds have several areas you absolutely can't get to without moves from later worlds, and combine that with the flying you get after world 4 before world 5, and you have a game that just feels absurdly unbalanced in its puzzles and design at times. If you play the puzzles as intended they're often good fun, but the game makes it so easy to just go around the intended solution that it almost feels like a waste of time to do that.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Yooka-Laylee is a fine game, but it really never gets exceptional on any respect that would make it very easily recommendable. It's basically all of Rare's collectathon's on the N64 boiled down into a mish-mash of good flair and questionable design choices, so while you could certainly enjoy it if you really like those kinds of games, you'll probably get some enjoyment out of Yooka-Laylee. Otherwise, you're probably better off playing any of Rare's old collectathons and re-enjoying them, because even DK 64 has more polish in its world design than Yooka-Laylee.
The game controls just fine. I never had any problems getting Yooka and Laylee to go where I wanted them to or go where I wanted them to go because of how they move. The bigger problem here is the camera and world design. The levels have a very unpolished feel to them that comes mostly from how basically ALL terrain is climbable if it has an edge, meaning you can go tons of places, sometimes entirely around puzzles, with even the slightest look-around. This is absolutely ruined at the end of the game where they give you the power of nearly unrestricted anywhere-flying, like Banjo-Kazooie had in its early prototypes, but they couldn't get balanced properly so they took out, and it ruins this game just like it would've ruined that one. The engine feels very ill-designed for a game like this with how caught on the tight scenery the camera can get and how easily scale-able EVERYTHING you can see is. The way the flying effectively destroys the rest of the game's jumping puzzles is just a cherry on the sundae on top of the other worst design choice: World expansion.
Instead of having 10 worlds, Yooka-Laylee has 5 that you expand after first unlocking them. Roughly half of the collectibles in each world are stuck behind this expansion that expands the map and makes everything bigger, but this mechanic just plain sucks. New quills (the notes of this games) or Pagies will be sometimes where the old world already existed, meaning you effectively need to retrace your steps around the ENTIRE world to make sure you haven't missed anything. Put this on top of how the first 3 worlds have several areas you absolutely can't get to without moves from later worlds, and combine that with the flying you get after world 4 before world 5, and you have a game that just feels absurdly unbalanced in its puzzles and design at times. If you play the puzzles as intended they're often good fun, but the game makes it so easy to just go around the intended solution that it almost feels like a waste of time to do that.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Yooka-Laylee is a fine game, but it really never gets exceptional on any respect that would make it very easily recommendable. It's basically all of Rare's collectathon's on the N64 boiled down into a mish-mash of good flair and questionable design choices, so while you could certainly enjoy it if you really like those kinds of games, you'll probably get some enjoyment out of Yooka-Laylee. Otherwise, you're probably better off playing any of Rare's old collectathons and re-enjoying them, because even DK 64 has more polish in its world design than Yooka-Laylee.