Imagine a time back when Nintendo was king. The Nintendo 64 was at the top of every kids wish list so they could play new 3D games. “Super Mario 64,” “Ocarina of Time,” “Mario Kart 64,” were some of the many games taking advantage of new 3D environments. Working alongside Nintendo was a company called Rareware. They created some of the most fondly remembered 3D platformers like “Conker’s Bad Fur Day”, “Donkey Kong 64” and their most famous game “Banjo-Kazooie,” named after the duo of a bear and a bird, respectively.
Now, almost twenty years after Banjo-Kazooie was released, former developers for Rareware, now owned by Microsoft, have formed their own company, Playtonic Games. They’ve brought the world another open 3D platformer with a musically named duo in “Yooka-Laylee.” Can this game recapture the spirit of and restore some life to this long thought dead genre?
“Yooka-Laylee” stars a chameleon named Yooka and his fruit bat friend Laylee attempting to rescue magical quills and book pages, named Pagies, from the evil corporate boss Capital B and his henchman Dr. Quack.
From the names alone, the games great sense of humor jumps out. Capital B, for example, has a pun on capitalization in his name, as well as his business mindset referenced, as well as the fact that he is an actual fat bumble bee, stripes and all.
The game also pokes fun at gaming tropes, young and old. In one sequence, after racing with a raincloud, Laylee references that “cloud based racing, how next gen” and the loading screen states that “if cartridges were still popular, this game would have loaded by now.”
However, this joke about loading points out a flaw inherent in the entire game. While it’s fine to poke fun at past conventions at how inconvenient they used to be, “Yooka-Laylee” still has them. It pokes fun at these conventions without actually trying to change them. The game is flawed on a basic level because of this and many other issues.
Load times are only one problem and while it’s a constant one, the biggest issue is the game’s worlds. “Yooka-Laylee” has only five worlds to explore and while there isn’t a minimum requirement (“Banjo-Kazooie” had double that) only three of those worlds are really fun. The other two are downright awful, due to confusing level design and a general barren and empty nature.
Yooka and Laylee also don’t control well. Platformers tend to have tight and immediately responsive controls, but Yooka and Laylee float around with a kind of looseness. It isn’t noticeable all the time, but the few missions that focus specifically on platforming skills become especially irritating because of this.
Missions are also largely hit or miss. While the good ones far outweigh the bad, the bad stick out like a sore thumb because of insane difficulty spikes out of character with the rest of the game. It is fun to collect items and complete missions, but the drive to collect them all is mostly absent due to the difficulty.
Character design also follows a similar suit, with a majority being well designed and enjoyable to look at, Yooka and Laylee being particularly adorable. The overall art style is cute, but when enemies or characters are ugly, good lord are they really ugly.
“Yooka-Laylee” is a game that is flawed on multiple levels. Some of these flaws are technical and could be fixed in updates, some are flawed designs. But somehow, “Yooka-Laylee” manages to be more than the sum of its parts, surviving as a frustratingly fun and charming game that helps to revitalize a genre most thought was long dead. It doesn’t do it flawlessly, but it still does it enjoyably. 3/5
