Yooka-Laylee

Yooka-Laylee has done what everyone, developers and players, had hoped it to do and brought the 3D platformer kicking and screaming into gaming mainstream again, spearheading the revival. But it’s also so much more than expected.

It’s a fantastic game overall, and owners of any platform should have fun with it – although Xbox One owners may want to stick with that version since that would then be the ultimate way to play all the B-K and B-K-style games on one device.

Aside from the annoying camera work, Yooka-Laylee is a whole lot of fun that will keep platformer fans busy for hours on end as they explore every nook and cranny throughout the world. This is nostalgia done right. Playtonic Games have used their past experiences and brought them into the hear and now. They have managed to keep the core elements that everyone came to love in Banjo-Kazooie while managing to ramp everything up to the next level. Yooka-Laylee is a game that is a pleasant surprise, an enjoyable experience, and one we highly recommend for gamers of all types.

Yooka-Laylee strikes all the right notes: great platforming action, vast and gorgeous worlds with high variety and lots of secrets and hidden areas, tons of humor. Even without considering the nostalgia element, this is definitely one of the best platform games of last decade. A must have.

Yooka-Laylee is the comeback of the classic platforming genre. An excellent result in a new universe that feels familiar in a lot of ways and the introduction of two new characters that will become your new friends.

Yooka-Laylee is both a joyful ode to Rare’s heyday and a polished platformer that stands head and shoulders above what few contemporaries exist in the genre.

Forget Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts -- Yooka-Laylee is the third game in the Banjo-Kazooie series.

Yooka-Laylee is a whimsical and witty gem of a 3D platformer, offering a wealth of secrets to find, puzzles to solve and large colorful worlds to explore each of which are populated with some of the most charming characters to hit a video game in years. The good far outweighs the negative and any shortcomings found never outshine the fun to be had. Yooka-Laylee made me feel like a kid again and proves there’s still a place for the classic 3D collectathon.

Yooka-Laylee is classic 3D-era platformer. It brings an updated presentation to the genre, and it provides some solid and familiar platforming mechanics. The large levels provide a nice playground for those abilities, and while the combat isn't anything special, it's a lot of fun to complete the various tasks to collect pagies. If you can deal with the problematic camera, Yooka-Laylee is worth checking out.

Hopefully Playtonic continues to support Yooka-Laylee with updates and refinements. But even with a few rough edges here and there, this is still a huge game that platforming fans must not miss.

Yooka-Laylee is a fun platformer, despite some technical issues and outdated mechanics. If platforming wasn’t your thing in the ‘90s, there’s little here to change your mind now, but fans of the genre – and the Kickstarter backers that brought it back to life – can rest assured that they’re getting exactly what they wanted.

It feels like a love letter to a time of games gone by in the best way possible, and it's hard not to be drawn to the way the game looks. A few issues with the camera and some of the controls stop the game being perfect, but it isn't far off.

Yooka-Laylee is a lot of goofy fun wrapped in a light and colorful retro package, a fine return to the platformers of old.

Yooka Laylee takes us directly to the 90s and makes us dream of a genre that was almost extinct. The allusions to Banjo are more than evident and the game offers an exceptional proposal. However it has some weak points that keep it short of excellence.

What the game loses by not having had a Rare/Nintendo-sized QA department to smooth its rough edges it compensates for with a princely pile of ideas, and a lovely control scheme that only improves with elaboration.

The gameplay and structure lay the nostalgia on thick, but even those parts of Yooka-Laylee pale in comparison to the narrative. Whenever characters speak, the onscreen text is accompanied by grunting sounds like those found in Banjo-Kazooie. This is a charming callback at first, but when you're out in the hub world and the main villain begins taunting you repeatedly, it becomes annoying.

The control issues are dwarfed by all the good in Yooka-Laylee, this modern day throwback that seems tailormade to yank at nostalgia strings.

Serving as an homage to the past, Yooka-Laylee is strongly inspired by elements of the team’s previous efforts, and despite some flaws, it is the game that fans have been waiting for all these years.

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. Playtonic's first foray is rough around the edges, but the center is so full of heart that it'll melt away the more you play it.

Yooka-Laylee is a fun throwback to a bygone era of gaming, with more than enough charm, variety, and engaging challenges to make up for its shortcomings.

At its core Yooka-Laylee features solid 3D platforming, all wrapped-up in a charming and funny package that oozes with the quality that drew a lot of players to Rare’s output during the N64 era. And although this may sound like strange criticism, we would have preferred it if the game featured fewer ideas, smaller worlds, and a more focused design. Yooka-Laylee’s better moments far outweigh its troublesome ones, and for the most part you’ll feel like you’re playing a Rare platformer from the year 1999. And when that’s what Yooka-Laylee promised to be, you can’t fault it for delivering on that promise. Warts and all.

Overall, Yooka-Laylee is a good game which needs some more technical work on Xbox One. The platforming feels unrefined due to the movement and camera. Despite that, the soundtrack by David Wise and Grant Kirkhope gets stuck in your head and the co-op mode is a lot of fun. Yooka-Laylee is built on an incredibly solid foundation but has some growing up to do.

Yooka-Laylee is a fun, familiar, and nostalgic trip to a genre from the past that still holds up incredibly well in the present. It certainly proves that there is a place in the current landscape for games of this genre. If you miss the mascot platformer of yesteryear, then Yooka-Laylee will almost certainly give you your fill and make you feel warm inside.

Wickedly funny and not afraid to make you work, Yooka-Laylee is diabolically fun. [June 2017, p.69]

Some long-forgotten issues from way back in the day crop up again in this throwback action-plaformer, but even if you aren’t playing it through the nostaliga of someone who grew up with Banjo-Kazooie or other adventures like it, you’ll still find a solid game to play in Yooka-Laylee.

Yooka-Laylee is in every way a love letter to the platform genre of the 90's. There is tons of stuff to do, funny looking characters everywhere and new surprises behind every corner. On the negative side there are some technical issues along with a struggling camera. But overall, if you are a fan of Banjo-Kazooie, you're probably going to have plenty of fun with this.

Yooka-Laylee is exactly what Playtonic promised, and also exactly what I expected. While some of the levels are not great, the overall package takes me back to a different time where the genre thrived. For better or worse this game recaptures what made those games special, and frankly if it starred a certain bear and bird combo, it could have easily been a sequel to a game from that era. For those that long for collecting endless arrays of useless items, this game is a must play, for everyone else that grew out of that genre long ago, there is nothing here to bring you back. Except maybe for that music, my goodness is it good.

Yooka-Laylee contains all the pieces needed for a fun, enjoyable throwback to the 3D collectathons of the 64-bit era. The characters are charming and funny, your set of abilities is vast and entertaining, and four out of five of the worlds are fun playgrounds to explore. While it lacks the heart and polish of some of its incredible predecessors, it’s a good reminder that this genre, once thought to be dead, still has some life left in it.

A game of inconsistent highs and lows. The simple joy of interacting with a colorful, childish world serves to remind us of a different time for video games. But when stuttering camera angles send you plummeting off a high platform, the lack of polish is painfully obvious.

I don’t doubt that Yooka-Laylee will push some buttons for players of a certain age who possess the predilections it was designed to sate. I, myself, have one foot in that group. But my other foot rests in what I can’t help but think is a much larger pool of players conditioned by modern game design who are now unwilling to put up with the problems of games past.

ooka-Laylee’s full use of the color spectrum, Grant Kirkhope, David Wise, and Steve Burke’s endearing score, and its relentless positivity are boons to its medium. It’s also firmly disinterested in twenty years of forward progress, doubling as a paean to Banjo’s banal challenges, mushy control, and distressing tedium. It’s tough to feel bitter—Playtonic delivered what was promised—it’s just awfully easy to feel chafed and bored, too.

Yooka-Laylee is built out of the heart, soul, guts, and bones of Banjo-Kazooie. It's exactly what fans of Rare's classic 3D wanted. Unfortunately, technical issues stick to it like bat guano.

Starting out relatively strong in the grand scheme of things, [Yooka-Laylee] unfortunately loses focus and charm as you progress, until you ask yourself why you’re putting yourself through it just to collect quills that become useless and Pagies that simply aren’t worth the frustration.

Yooka-Laylee’s best and worst aspects come directly from its predecessor. Despite attempts at modernizing the formula, its style of gameplay is still outdated, and it doesn’t stay challenging or interesting for long as a result. But if you’re looking for a faithful return to the Banjo-Kazooie formula, Yooka-Laylee certainly delivers--from the font to the music to the wealth of collectibles, it’s worthy of the title of spiritual successor.

At its best, Yooka-Laylee is a fun retread of '90s-era 3D platforming. Unfortunately, it fails to move the genre forward in any significant way, and even brings back several pains that should have stayed firmly planted in the past.

Yooka-Laylee is not a bad game, but by God does it have its problems. If you’re hankering for a 3D platformer in the vein of Banjo-Kazooie, Spyro, Mario or Crash, I’d still say this is worth a bit of your time if you’re willing to chew on the game in short sections. But if you want to marathon the game, or don’t mind waiting until later in the year to have your genre itch scratched, you’re probably better off passing on this.

Yooka-Laylee could have been the start of a new generation of 3D platformers, but its design leaves it firmly stuck in the past.