Elements Yooka-Laylee Needs To Spiritually Succeed Banjo-Kazooie

Yooka-Laylee is the Kickstarted spiritual successor to a beloved retro franchise, brought to life due to said franchises’ copyright holder refusing to do so itself.

Too many times the controls feel like they’re working against you when you spin like Sonic the Hedgehog or make use of Laylee to fly. The boss in itself isn’t that annoying, just a sentient stone slope spewing out logs to try to stop you from ascending to its peak, where its giant gurning mouth is. This is compounded by the fact that I found it hard to care about the characters, who all feel quite boring.

I’m a big fan of the sheer amount and variety of abilities that the two characters you control simultaneously, Yooka and Laylee, amass over the course of the campaign. The evil Capital B wants a book, so he starts sucking up all the books in the land. With lush worlds, puzzles and cartoony fun, is Yooka-Laylee a must or does it fail to meet expectations? Its worlds are full of character and Playtonic’s knack for creating a colourful cast is rife; it’s pun game is wonderfully strong – even with a glut of woeful dad jokes swirling around in there – and it’s clearly made for those itching to break the N64 out from the attic.

Yooka-Laylee faired a little better over on our sister network, but not much. The characters are charming and amusing, your set of abilities is vast and entertaining, and four out of five of the worlds are fun playgrounds to explore. Players must chat to characters in the world to figure out how to solve missions in order to receive Pagies.

My good buddy considers himself a pretty big fan of Donkey Kong 64. Along the way you’ll collect about a half dozen other types of items or tokens that will either contribute to getting more Pagies for the set or health and ability upgrades.

As is often the case with this kind of humour, the self-awareness is by turns infectious and grating – jokes about unskippable dialogue and quality assurance are only so amusing when they occur in a game that does, in fact, feature the odd wodge of unskippable dialogue and a rather unwieldy camera. Some of the missions are quite extensive and involved – and when there’s 25 per world, it can be easy to lose track of them.

There’s also a nice flow to the protagonists’ power growth, and how that impacts progression through the game. Compounding this with my lack of interest for the stories and characters, this definitely wasn’t a good thing. PlayTonic even acknowledges this to be an issue, saying that one of the Rextro mini-games “has a better camera than the main quest”, but acknowledging a problem doesn’t make it any less maddening.

Yooka can also gobble down berries to spit grenades or snowballs among other projectiles – feats of markmanship that go hand in hand with simple door-and-switch puzzles or (more problematically) arcade shooting gallery sequences. Yooka-Laylee wouldn’t be a platformer if it didn’t feature the occasional frustrating section plagued by ice physics, but thankfully those are few and far between in the game’s token ice world, Glitterglaze Glacier.

But hey, a platformer can get by with iffy presentation if it nails the fundamentals.

Expect to be frustrated by Yooka-Laylee, but also expect to look at the clock and realize hours have disappeared while you were cursing at the game. With older platformers no one had figured out analogue controls, or how to make a camera not feel like a clunky monstrosity. Yooka can use his tongue to grab elemental fruit, becoming a one-lizard Captain Planet and The Planeteers, and moments of mild entertainment occur when you juggle all the abilities together. Even when the camera chose to do its own weird thing and fight against me, or when the framerate stuttered, or when the controls just felt unwieldy, I saw past it as the old school platforming action was worth the effort. It feels like they’ve literally just taken the camera from the Nintendo 64 version and thrown it in without any adjustments.

Speaking of living up to Rare’s legacy, Yooka-Laylee has really great soundtrack that 100% feels like it was recorded in the late ’90s, which I mean in the best possible way. Pagies are harder to come by, and they unlock new worlds in the game.

‘Banjo Threeie is probably never going to happen, but after playing Yooka-Laylee I’m fine with that for the first time in 17 years. Among them is the book that Yooka and Laylee posses, which is destroyed in the process.

The game stars titular characters Yooka and Laylee.

There are more personal transformations, too, thanks to former Quack Corp scientist and Yooka and Laylee’s ally, Dr. Puzz, and her D.N.Ray: Where a lizard and bat might not get the job done, perhaps an anthropomorphized snowplough or colorful shoal of piranha might.