Yooka-Laylee

 PC
User Score
6.5

Mixed or average reviews- based on 339 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 196 out of 339
  2. Mixed: 43 out of 339
  3. Negative: 100 out of 339

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  1. cornfingers
    Apr 17, 2017
    2
    A game I very much wanted to like, especially since banjo-kazooie was one of my favorite games growing up. The first 5 minutes were great, if you ignore the annoying voice acting... which thankfully can be skipped for the most part... and I wanted to keep playing. Three hours in and I think I'm done. The hub world doesn't seem cohesive. The expanding of worlds seemed cool at first, andA game I very much wanted to like, especially since banjo-kazooie was one of my favorite games growing up. The first 5 minutes were great, if you ignore the annoying voice acting... which thankfully can be skipped for the most part... and I wanted to keep playing. Three hours in and I think I'm done. The hub world doesn't seem cohesive. The expanding of worlds seemed cool at first, and then you just realize it was to pad the content since you have to revisit places you've already visited... just give me the whole world at once... maybe let me expand for secrets. Some of the mechanics aren't well explained. How am I supposed to know I need to click the left stick to aim? That made for some very frustrating puzzles before I learned that. The transformations are crap and you get nothing from doing them... wow a page... yay! It was totally worth walking at 1 ft a minute and losing all my abilities to get it. Rextro sucks, and the games are garbage... it shouldn't be required for a page. I played world one and got to the first boss... ended up skipping it and looking for world 2... get to world 2 and get to the second boss... end up skipping it. Putting the game down there. The two first bosses of this game are complete garbage... and that sums up the rest of the game. The entire time you're fighting with the camera. The world's are big and empty with copy pasted NPCs around to do some mini games... and it just has zero charm. It literally feels like I'm playing a FAN game of banjo kazooie. I can't play this anymore and will refund it. I feel awful for anyone who backed it.… Expand
  2. bobreviews
    Apr 30, 2017
    2
    Grating dialogue grunting, bad jokes, poor camera control, and graphical glitches simply do not have a place in todays world. And that's after the pre-release patch. I can only imagine how bad it was before hand.

    The Camera is everything in a 3D platformer, and this experience is simply marred with jitters, steering issues, sudden jerks and not looking at where the player is moving. Not    Grating dialogue grunting, bad jokes, poor camera control, and graphical glitches simply do not have a place in todays world. And that's after the pre-release patch. I can only imagine how bad it was before hand.

    The Camera is everything in a 3D platformer, and this experience is simply marred with jitters, steering issues, sudden jerks and not looking at where the player is moving. Not to mention how weird the interactions are - you can stand on some inclines, but not others, some abilities will affect some enemies, but not others where you'd expect they would.

    It feels like it might have been developed by people who never talked to one another or coordinated their efforts at all. And for a follow on for a game built on characters - as Banjo Kazooie was, the ones here have no personality beyond their basic concept drawings.    … Expand
  3. LWells
    Apr 11, 2017
    4
    Progress: Game not complete, but game isn't making me feel like playing anymore.

    Visuals are an eyesore, a lot of the *slightly* different power-ups in the game just leave a void in my gut when I collect them, no real improvements on the old formula, and for the most important part: I don't know if I'm getting old but the gameplay was a 5/10 at best. It all should add up to keep me    Progress: Game not complete, but game isn't making me feel like playing anymore.

    Visuals are an eyesore, a lot of the *slightly* different power-ups in the game just leave a void in my gut when I collect them, no real improvements on the old formula, and for the most important part:
    I don't know if I'm getting old but the gameplay was a 5/10 at best. It all should add up to keep me wanting to move onward but I feel so impulsed to just quit at any moment.

    Polish, while in theory some bizarre abstract concept thrown around in the industry as some buzzword excuse of an argument, is really the core of what kept people going in Banjo & Kazooie and Yooka-Laylee's other predecessors.

    But hey, at least the music is good. And the character designs are great. And I faced no frame-rate issues whatsoever AND I encountered no glitches whatsoever except for a few unavoidable camera ones (as a dev I'm amazed from a small team)

    I feel really bad for the Yooka-Laylee developers reading ALL the day one reviews but I personally believe they tried to make a game that tried to meet the impossible expectations... and when faced to reality, didn't really meet those 10/10 GOTY requirements. Which really upset me because I was stoked to get the game.

    I really hope the team continues to make games in the future. Bigger, better ones, and even if they're all seasoned veterans, they should continue to learn as they work into the future.    … Expand
  4. megasmallcow
    Apr 11, 2017
    2
    I bought this game a while back as I wanted a sequel to Banjo Kazooie, and went into fully excited.
    Now that the games out, its just, really bland.
    The levels are super open and boring, the platforming is gimmicky and the music is... annoying. I don't know how they messed it up so bad, I got half way and dont want to play anymore, I wish I could refund but the company doesnt like to    I bought this game a while back as I wanted a sequel to Banjo Kazooie, and went into fully excited.
    Now that the games out, its just, really bland.
    The levels are super open and boring, the platforming is gimmicky and the music is... annoying.
    I don't know how they messed it up so bad, I got half way and dont want to play anymore, I wish I could refund but the company doesnt like to give out refunds, and seems to be a bunch of asshats to their customers so they got what was coming I suppose.
    Oh well, RIP platformers.    … Expand
  5. drazah
    Apr 18, 2017
    2
    This game was fun for all of about 2 hours, then quickly became stale and very not-fun. Rolling around, jumping from platform to platform, and learning new abilities were the games best aspect. But the music gets very stale after that (the same obnoxious songs play repeatedly) and the pagies are often devoid of any challenge, simply walk up and grab them.
  6. tremault
    Apr 21, 2017
    3
    I supported these guys on kickstarter because I figured it would be nice to get some new games of this genre especially on PC. I mean playstation has ratchet and clank, but not on PC. To be honest, I was prepared to forgive a lot. the camera is a bit stupid, but I'll let that slide. The music is a little annoying but i'll let that slide. The snake guy is really annoying, but I'll let thatI supported these guys on kickstarter because I figured it would be nice to get some new games of this genre especially on PC. I mean playstation has ratchet and clank, but not on PC. To be honest, I was prepared to forgive a lot. the camera is a bit stupid, but I'll let that slide. The music is a little annoying but i'll let that slide. The snake guy is really annoying, but I'll let that slide..

    what I won't let sllide is absolutely NO impetus to do anything in this game. the premise is next to non existent. there is no decent reason to do anything in this game, the only objective is to collect more pagies. I'm sorry, but that is just not good enough. even super mario bros had more drive than that. yes, collecting coins was nice, but the objective was to rescue the princess. you had a REASON to continue going. In Yooka Laylee, the only drive for the main characters is get book, sell it for money. bigger questions might be, who will you sell it to? what will you spend the money on? the world has no other form of civilisation or even any hints of it. there is no depth to the characters, just "we want profit". I have never seen such empty, lifeless, 1 dimensional characters.
    I was willing to forgive a lot, but at the end of the day, I need some kind of motivation to play a game. Yooka Laylee gives zero motivation and playing it I just felt completely and utterly depressed. My whole mindset was "what is the point of this". Industry veterans can and should do better than this. very poor show indeed.    … Expand
  7. firehazard42
    Apr 13, 2017
    4
    I wanna start by saying I'm one of the biggest fans of the original games for the N64. I love the Banjo games and I'd be the first one to say that I wanted this game to be good, I wanted Banjo back.

    But perhaps my hopes, all our hopes, were misguided. See, what we wanted wasn't just Banjo Threeie. What we wanted was that same magic feeling that the Banjo games gave us, that same burst    I wanna start by saying I'm one of the biggest fans of the original games for the N64. I love the Banjo games and I'd be the first one to say that I wanted this game to be good, I wanted Banjo back.

    But perhaps my hopes, all our hopes, were misguided. See, what we wanted wasn't just Banjo Threeie. What we wanted was that same magic feeling that the Banjo games gave us, that same burst of charm and wonder, which this game sorrowfully lacks. And now that we've grown up and had more gaming experiences, a game that so shamelessly feels like nothing but a pretty looking remaster of a game nearly two decades old feels rather dated. The evolution isn't there, the bar was raised, and Yooka Laylee has neither the ambition nor the talent to meet it.

    Sure the charming writing is there, but a lack of restraint really makes the fourth wall breaking less special. It's like as soon as the game starts it's saying "Oh hey, you're playing a video game, do you know that? LOL I'm so clever for making that observation haha!" Unlike the originals, which saved the fourth wall jokes for times when it's actually funny or poignant. The characters are recycled between levels instead of having new ones show up which actually fit the levels they are in. The camera and the controls often feel like they would rather fight you instead of let you experience the world. The levels are disjointed and boxed in rather than sprawling and interconnected, and the fact that they need to be "expanded" by playing in them seems completely unnecessary: You waste time to exit and re-enter the level to get the full experience. Dumb restrictions and petty annoyances like the stamina meter or loud and obnoxious voice acting add up over time and continuously grade away at your patience until it's nothing but buyer's pity and your nostalgia driving you to complete the game.

    Its got its heart in the right place, but at the end of the day Yooka Laylee is pretty much just a mediocre 3D platformer with pretty visuals and a comedic tone. I wanted a true return to glory, and instead I am playing what feels more like a fan tribute of it's predecessor from 1998, but even then ends up just being worse.    … Expand
  8. Gussy
    Apr 13, 2017
    1
    All of the annoyances of a generation long gone, without any of the charm that made those games memorable. A soulless game not worth the time of people who are looking to meet new iconic characters and go for unforgettable adventures with them, much like they did in their childhood
  9. ccateni
    Apr 11, 2017
    2
    This game was trying to be good, but it can't be. The character are charming, and the game plays well, but it can't beat the originals, and compared to them, it makes the game worse, like a ripoff. Give this game a skip; there are much better indie titles to play on steam.
  10. BadGameGuy69
    Jul 29, 2017
    2
    Somehow a bigger disappointment than my son:
    But unlike my son, this game will not eventually hang itself in a gas station bathroom. The game was so simplistic and was on nostalgia life support, the placement of objects were as sloppy as possible. The numerous useless transformations in the game ruined me, like the helicopter noise not syncing with the speed of the blades haunts me like    Somehow a bigger disappointment than my son:
    But unlike my son, this game will not eventually hang itself in a gas station bathroom. The game was so simplistic and was on nostalgia life support, the placement of objects were as sloppy as possible. The numerous useless transformations in the game ruined me, like the helicopter noise not syncing with the speed of the blades haunts me like the screams of my son going through puberty beating his dog with a sock monkey in the basement and the characters are much like my ex wife who are ugly and do nothing but ruin my life. The sound effects were like a toilet where no matter what there's always garbage spewing out the front. Destroying this piece of garbage won't bring my son back but I'm okay with that. This game is much like my autistic daughter where the more it tries the more it just spits on itself. The voice acting ( if you want to call it that) sounds like my grandfather with turrets dying words but at least in the end he passed on peacefully unlike yooka laylee that feels the need to go on without end... Unlike my son. In the end, this game was like Ash's stoutland and had nothing else to live for and will fade away into obscurity.    … Expand
  11. bladex
    Apr 13, 2017
    3
    game is worse than dk64 ever was. it will stop being fun very fast and have you doing annoying mini game bs to collect pagies. there's no bosses instead you have to do a crappy quiz so means remember every single thing you did in the game including how long you've been playing to pass...

    there is no warp system meaning you have to drag yourself through the entire hub back tracking back    game is worse than dk64 ever was. it will stop being fun very fast and have you doing annoying mini game bs to collect pagies. there's no bosses instead you have to do a crappy quiz so means remember every single thing you did in the game including how long you've been playing to pass...

    there is no warp system meaning you have to drag yourself through the entire hub back tracking back to each level over and over again...

    it's just not a fun platformer to play a terrible terrible reboot to the genre.    … Expand
  12. deaththekid922
    Apr 12, 2017
    1
    the game gets stale super fast , im at 3 Hours and i just dont feel like playing it anymore , areas are way too generic and just oversized ( in height )

    and most Pagies are so stupidly easy , just press a button or jumpo through a few rings toi get them , even in Mayahem Temple Tooie had harder jiggies
  13. fykins
    Apr 25, 2017
    0
    This game is not worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence as banjo kazooie. There are just so many reasons not to get this game, just another early access game that turned to trash. Oh sure they took your money upfront and that's exactly why they don't need to deliver at launch time.

    There's plenty of titles for less than $20 on steam that are better games than this.
  14. Chashmodai
    Jun 21, 2020
    3
    It's mediocre. Pretty much a ripoff of old Rare games. One can say that it's a "tribute", it's paying homage to, it's inspired by.. but it's just a ripoff.

    Bonus point for having the most cringeworthy "voice acting" in any game ever, though.
  15. ZetaJiffils
    Dec 31, 2019
    0
    Copia descarada de Banjo-Kazooie, tanto en la música, personajes y dialéctica de los mismos.
  16. TitaniumDragon
    Jun 7, 2018
    3
    Yooka-Laylee is an intentional invocation of old collectathon platformers from Ye Olde N64 days. In particular, it is meant to evoke Rare’s collectathons, most notably Banjo-Kazooie, a game about a bear and a bird, which definitely bear no resemblance whatsoever to the lizard and bat protagonists of THIS game, no sir!

    Unfortunately, while the magic of Kickstarter created this game, it    Yooka-Laylee is an intentional invocation of old collectathon platformers from Ye Olde N64 days. In particular, it is meant to evoke Rare’s collectathons, most notably Banjo-Kazooie, a game about a bear and a bird, which definitely bear no resemblance whatsoever to the lizard and bat protagonists of THIS game, no sir!

    Unfortunately, while the magic of Kickstarter created this game, it lacks some of the magic of the old collectathons – if, indeed, they had magic at all.

    After all, there is a reason why people are nostalgic for them, and it is that they have, by and large, disappeared.

    Yooka-Laylee is a fairly standard example of such a game starting out – you can jump, swim, and have a spin attack to kill enemies on the ground. Over the course of the game you buy additional moves from Trowser, your friendly, not at all unscrupulous snake wearing a pair of pants. Somehow. You gain the ability to jump higher, to glide, do a fast roll on the ground, do a roll boost to break glass, eat seeds to spit at stuff, turn invisible, and eventually, the ability to outright fly and turn invincible.

    And yes, the ability to fly does, in fact, pretty much break many of the challenges of the first four worlds, as why do 3D platforming when you can just, you know, fly?

    But the reality is that this isn’t much of a loss as, sadly, the game never really excels.

    Yooka-Laylee has a hub world which connects up to five other worlds. As with many such games, there are collectibles hidden in the hub world, as well as in all of the various other worlds. The primary collectable of the game are Pagies, pages with faces on them. There are 145 of them, plus quills, which are the equivalent of coins – 200 per level, and collecting them all in each world awards you with another Pagie. The game has four other collectibles, but they’re fairly reserved – a coin to play an “arcade game” in each world, extra health, extra energy for your special attacks, and the “Mollycool”, which enables a different transformation in each world.

    The problem with Yooka-Laylee is that games like this live and die on their worlds, and Yooka-Laylee’s worlds are, by and large, utterly unremarkable.

    The first level – Tribalstack Tropics – is a semi-promising start, and seems like a fairly standard opening stage, but as you go further through the game, the stages start feeling less and less well-integrated, and more and more like a collection of random platforming challenges stuck in independent of each other to form a “level”. The third and fifth levels – the swamp level and the “space” level that doesn’t actually have any real “space” mechanics – are both pretty much explicitly just a bunch of stuff stuck together with no real cohesion to it, and while the casino world feels built up on top of itself, it also manages to be by far the most tedious level to find missing collectibles in due to its 3D nature.

    But perhaps the greatest crime is that the pagies themselves feel completely arbitrary. Why are the game’s collectibles all book-themed? The worlds are ostensibly in books, but the game makes no use at all of this in any way, nor does it seem to have any meaningful relationship to the characters. It all feels very arbitrary.

    But the Pagie puzzles themselves often feel quite arbitrary, and not terribly satisfying to complete. Most of them are pretty easy, some of them are harder, and one of them probably took me as long as five others combined to do thanks to rather poor controls (rolling around a ball can be quite an imprecise thing, especially when wind is blowing at you from all directions in intervals). Many of the puzzles consist of talking to some NPC and doing some inane little task for them, and it just lacks much of a sense of satisfaction – getting stars in Super Mario 64, or the major collectibles in Donkey Kong 64, felt significant, but here, it just felt like ticking off a checkbox. Some of these challenges felt much more significant than others, with some pagies practically being given to you while others took some more significant task to collect, and the whole thing felt weirdly inconsistent as a result.

    It isn’t just the pagies, either – the game as a whole feels very arbitrary. And while yes, many of those games were fundamentally arbitrary, at least they felt like they tried, just a little. Yooka-Laylee constantly leans on fourth wall breaking humor, constantly referring to itself as a game, as if that would be funny – but really, it isn’t. A little bit of fourth wall humor can be fun, but if you do it too much, it just becomes eye-rolling and expected, and loses its surprise value. That’s not to say that a few jokes didn’t land – the game’s final boss being a “crowdfunded capitalist” was an amusing self-jab – but mostly, it just kind of felt like it went with a very juvenile humor, even more so than the N64 games it was emulating.    … Expand
  17. kuehnau
    Dec 3, 2018
    4
    Yooka-Laylee is inspired by retro platforms like Banjo Kazooie, Super Mario 64 or Gex. It's another run of the mill collect-a-thon games that require you to run, jump and swim through worlds, collecting random odds and ends in order to unlock newer worlds, events and skills.

    It's a beautiful looking game and when you turn the settings up to max, it really outshines even some of the    Yooka-Laylee is inspired by retro platforms like Banjo Kazooie, Super Mario 64 or Gex. It's another run of the mill collect-a-thon games that require you to run, jump and swim through worlds, collecting random odds and ends in order to unlock newer worlds, events and skills.

    It's a beautiful looking game and when you turn the settings up to max, it really outshines even some of the more modern releases of games in the same genre.

    With that out of the way, I have nothing nicer to say about Yooka-Laylee.

    The game worlds are huge, often too large, if you ask me. Much of the space is completely empty, leaving you wandering around while you look for the bits and pieces you need to collect to progress in the game. Even enemies are amazingly sparse in the game. If the developers would have made the worlds smaller and more populated I feel as if the game would have been significantly more enjoyable.

    As it is, the game feels like it's 90% mini games and 10% action and adventure. Some of the worst aspects of the game are all of the racing trials the game puts you through. They aren't handled well and are amazingly frustrating, combine that with super poor hit detection and slippery as ice controls and you are gonna be in for a bad time.

    On the surface, this game looks like it would be great for children, on the contrary, the game can be so so frustrating that I can see younger players throwing controllers and melting down in frustration over the game. I myself ended up doing the first racing challange about a dozen times before I was able to beat it and by the time I was done, I was already sick of the game.

    Frankly, I don't know if I can even bring myself to complete this game. Yes, it's a throwback to an earlier games from yesteryear, but even those games knew how to package it and present it to the players. Yooka-Laylee does it all completely wrong and brings out the worst aspects in this genre of games.    … Expand
  18. wegie125
    Dec 8, 2017
    3
    This game had so much potential and promise and I don't know what happened but everything leading up to it's launch was just disappointment. Why did they have to remove JonTron from the game? Why did they use the Unity engine? Why are the characters just recycled. This game just reeks of inconsistency. Sometimes the music is great, other times it sucks. Controls are wonky. This game triedThis game had so much potential and promise and I don't know what happened but everything leading up to it's launch was just disappointment. Why did they have to remove JonTron from the game? Why did they use the Unity engine? Why are the characters just recycled. This game just reeks of inconsistency. Sometimes the music is great, other times it sucks. Controls are wonky. This game tried way too hard to be like the previous titles that rare made. Nothing will top those and they were too afraid to venture out of that area… Expand

Awards & Rankings

38
#38 Most Discussed PC Game of 2017
51
#51 Most Shared PC Game of 2017

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
73

Mixed or average reviews - based on 32 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 20 out of 32
  2. Mixed: 11 out of 32
  3. Negative: 1 out of 32
  1. LEVEL (Czech Republic)
    May 15, 2017
    60
    Likeable and (sometimes) funny 3D platformer in an open world does not even try to keep up with time. The acknowledged spiritual successor of the first Banjo-Kazooie is precised up to the last detail to give the same gameplay as its 1998 ”original”. [Issue#274]
  2. GameCritics
    May 9, 2017
    55
    I recently revisited the original Banjo-Kazooie as part of the Rare Replay compilation and still found it to be the best of its genre, and I’m not one of those people who believes that a mascot platformer has no place in the modern gaming scene. I was ready to celebrate the return of this genre, but Yooka-Laylee is simply a chore to play. The folks at Playtonic have demonstrated that they can recreate the spirit of old-school 3D platformers. Now, critically, they need to recreate the quality.
    Read full review
  3. Merlin'in Kazanı (Turkey)
    May 7, 2017
    73
    Quotation forthcoming.
    Read full review
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