Yooka Laylee Reviews
Minor annoyances aside, Yooka-Laylee is a solid 3D buddy platformer that's full of variety, humour, and a fantastic cast of characters all wrapped in a laidback adventure.
Taking you to magical worlds filled with lovable, memorable and frankly odd characters, Yooka-Laylee captures what made us love and hate 3D Platformers. If you weren’t a fan of this type of game in the past, then it’s very doubtful this new entry in the genre will change your mind. If you were a fan, then you’re in for a treat.
Entertaining a 3D-Platformer that's reminiscent of the genre's best
Yooka-Laylee comes as nostalgia covered with an outstanding design. It's colorful and flawless design execution conveys us that the good old-school will never die, but rise again stronger. Leaving aside its "little black stains in the white shirt", the experience is so entertaining that we can surely invest the necessary inner peace needed to conquer and master its camera system. This is a platform games that hit us right in the feels: in the best years of our younger gaming days. Yooka-Laylee draw many smiles filled with joy on our faces, it made us remember times that today return in with all the excellence and passion they deserve.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
From the promise of the Kickstarter and the people behind it, you might have expected Yooka-Laylee to be like a great band, getting back together for a new album after a long hiatus. What we've ended up with is something that feels like a cover version – of something a bit old-fashioned, not especially relevant today, and more than a little bit flawed – but if you loved Banjo-Kazooie, then you'll probably love the cover version just as much, and that's just fine.
I love Yooka-Laylee, unashamedly. I’ve only finished it recently, but already I want to start again and do it all over
The 3D platforming genre is sadly dying out, but it’s one of the reasons why Yooka-Laylee was so highly anticipated in the first place. It, unfortunately, doesn’t hit all the right notes and I think that everybody that has followed this game from the very beginning, expected a little bit better. Maybe it is indeed us that have hyped this game up too much, but I also think that when you label your game as a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie, you’re kind of adding that hype up yourself. It’s not a bad game by any means, however. By following the Banjo blueprint already set out, the fundamental gameplay elements on offer are superb and Yooka-Laylee is still fun, mostly. It’s a solid start for Playtonic, I just hope that with their next game, they let their talents run wild rather than sticking too close to the subject matter.
With Yooka-Laylee I think there are two distinct audiences that need to be spoken to for the summary. For major fans of the classic Rare look and feel there are a lot of joyful notes that Yooka-Laylee hits and as long as you don’t set your expectations too high you should enjoy it. For people who are less familiar or enamored with classic collect-a-thons it’s a bit harder to recommend, especially now that the long shadow of Mario Odyssey is hard to ignore. Even if it may not be everything I was hoping for Yooka-Laylee is an earnest title that shows a lot of love and reverence for the classic Rare titles that have obviously inspired it, I just wish it had done more to additionally forge out its own path.
Yooka-Laylee is a game which brings us back to the 3D platformer retro roots and brings all of what made those games from the 90s great with it. In doing so though, it also brought with it most of the faults which should have been ironed out a long time ago. I have mentioned the camera a few times, but it really hampers what otherwise could have been a great experience and makes the challenge more frustrating than it otherwise should have been. I love a challenge, but I want it to be a fair one and not hampered by game design issues. If you are after a 3d platformer which harks back to the 90s and brings all of the good and bad points from that era, then this might be for you. Yooka-Laylee are certainly adorable characters, the writing is quite funny, the visuals are nice and the music is lovely. It's a shame the gameplay doesn't quite marry up due to persistent niggles.
The extra time taken to bring Yooka Laylee to the Nintendo Switch has been worth it. The game runs extremely well on the Switch and feels well polished. A few design issues, however, means that this spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie is good but not quite great!
I can’t speak for how Yooka-Laylee compares to what veteran fans would expect, but as some who loved his fair share of older generation of platformers, Yooka-Laylee is the game the genre needs.
If Yooka-Laylee was made by any other developer who didn't previously work at Rare, this would be considered a blatant rip-off. But instead, Playtonic picks up where Rare couldn't. For whatever reason a new Banjo-Kazooie couldn't be made, and Yooka-Laylee takes its place. I'm looking forward to what's next, perhaps a new Nuts & Bolts-style game after this. Playtonic Games has captured a certain type of magic from 1998 and brought it to 2017 in spectacular form.
Yooka-Laylee mixes classic 3D platform exploration with eccentric, self referential humor and fluid movement to create a fantastic title that charms and engrosses a huge audience, casual or hardcore, young or old. Definitely worth looking into.
For more better than worse, Yooka-Laylee is practically a new game in the Banjo-Kazooie series. The camera is a problem that seems to come directly from its ancestors and its combat can become tedious, but these factors end up being secondary to puzzles, characters, dialogues, exploration and the platforming gameplay. In these points, the game manages to keep alive the spirit of the adventures of the old Rare but also adapts to introduce the "collecathon" style for a new generation. It lacks a touch of more modern design in some moments, but I had a lot of fun in the 26 hours it took me to finish (and I still have some collectibles and secrets to find) and I feel that in the end, the negative and positive points of Yooka-Laylee represent exactly the game Playtonic promised with its Kickstarter.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
I really wanted to like Yooka-Laylee. I don’t. Instead of taking a beloved style of game and updating it for modern times (à la Doom last year), Playtonic essentially created a game that could have been from 1998 and released it in 2017. The result is a mess of poorly implemented game mechanics that the games industry fixed two decades ago.
Overall, Yooka-Laylee is a game with a ton of retro-inspired heart, but a definite lack of polish may disappoint fans who expected the quality of their previous Banjo-Kazooie titles.
Overall, I feel as though Yooka-Laylee has teased me with the past. So many good individual aspects giving me a glimpse of what I loved of the genre. But there are so many other parts of it that detract from the experience and make me wonder if I put up with such things in the past, without noticing them.
The Level design of the actual worlds is great with both the large levels and the interesting ability to morph the levels. Each world is inhabited by an eclectic cast of humorous supporting character and gives the worlds a distinctive feel with a fantastic soundtrack that is just the icing on the cake of nostalgia.
Platforming ain’t dead. Yooka-Laylee however doesn’t really break any new ground. It does, however, apply a nice fresh coat of paint over the old mechanics of Banjo-Kazooie. The mini-games throughout provide some variety from the usual jumping around, but they rarely captured my interest for more than a minute or so. It is a great modern take on the platformer genre, but the bright colors and quirky music quickly dull after a couple hours when you find the game has little else to offer. Perhaps some will revel in the return of the collect-em-up, but the gameplay, however well-made and tight it is, seldom seems rewarding.
Yooka-Laylee is a title we like; it reminds us of the unique and nostalgic memories of when, still children, we put our hands on titles like Spyro, Croc
Review in Italian | Read full review