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.