Rare replay

is a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie that inherits its successes and its flaws.

The hardest enemy I had to fight in Yooka-Laylee was the camera. The minions sent by evil corporate book-napper Capital B were easily killed, but wrestling the third-person camera into submission was like trying to get an actual bat to ride on an actual iguana. Guiding Yooka the iguana and Laylee the bat on a quest to collect magical Pagies brought both a welcome sense of nostalgia and all the familiar flaws of N64-era 3D platformers. Yooka-Laylee is a sequel in everything but name to Banjo-Kazooie, made by much of the same team. It has the same cheeky dialogue, the same collectibles, and pretty much the same moveset for your interspecies buddy duo. But Yooka-Laylee also brings with it the same terrible camera and dull combat, and some aspects of what made Banjo-Kazooie so revolutionary in 1998 don’t necessarily hold up two decades later.

One part that definitely did hold up, however, is the jump. As simple as it is, a platformer’s jump can make or break the entire game. Here, Yooka-Laylee feels exactly right. Key components like high-jumping from a crouch or doublejumping into a glide feel natural, and make walking around any of the game’s five main worlds smooth and satisfying. Missing jumps or falling off ledges, for the most part, felt like my fault.

By contrast, Yooka-Laylee’s wider selection of movement systems rarely reach the same standard. There are unique transformations in each world, and most of them are a mess to control. The snowplough transformation on Glitterglaze Glacier nearly had me rage-quitting as I unpredictably drove off cliffs without being able to reverse. A later move that let me fly for an extended period was nearly impossible to control accurately if I wasn’t moving in a straight line, and glitched out visually if I went too high.

These issues are exacerbated by the aforementioned very bad camera. It wasn’t uncommon for the camera to pull in uncomfortably close anytime I got just a little too near to a wall. It’s the sort of nostalgia I could have done without, along with Yooka-Laylee’s lacklustre combat. The fighting isn’t terrible, it’s just pointless. I could walk straight past most enemies, but occasionally a few would get in my way and become a chore to clean up with basic spin attacks, respawning if I happened to leave the area.

But Yooka-Laylee’s biggest failing isn’t a legacy issue, it’s the game’s poor level design. The five worlds feel hollow and lacking soul, despite some cute themes. Each is an open sandbox with a smattering of challenges that reward you with collectible ‘Pagies’, often reusing tweaked versions of challenges from other worlds, preventing any one world from having a unique voice. There are multiple giant golf courses, lots of inexplicably floating minecart courses, and so many mind-numbing quiz segments that even Laylee got sick of them.

The themes of the worlds are genuinely lovely, lush with detail and visually distinct from each other. And while the quirky characters I met generally didn’t feel relevant to those worlds, the character design itself is great. The music from veteran Rare composers Grant Kirkhope and David Wise is also some of the best that I’ve heard in a long while, and may even surpass Banjo-Kazooie’s music at times.

Yooka-Laylee is really a beautiful game, and I love that the UI is hidden whenever it’s not needed, letting those graphics shine. On the performance side, Yooka-Laylee ran at a solid 60fps on my GTX 970 while at max settings. The options you can adjust are very limited, but thankfully I ran into essentially no performance issues while I played.

Playground bully

Yooka-Laylee looks and sounds like the modern 3D platformer I’ve been waiting for, it’s just that the actual things to do in each world don’t feel quite as inspired. Some of YookaLaylee’s more fun Pagies to earn were timed jumping courses which required real dexterity, but they were usually self-contained loops that ended where they began, meaning I rarely had to platform to progress through a level, just to get my prize and move on to the next one.

It’s frustrating, because YookaLaylee has genuine touches of greatness. It has a phenomenal soundtrack, clever writing, and tight fundamental platforming. But all of that is muddled by soulless level design that’s just OK at its best. It took me 12 hours to beat the game, without getting all 145 Pagies available. I could probably spend another 5-10 hours collecting the rest, but frankly Yooka-Laylee just didn’t make me want to.

Playtonic did a fine enough job of recreating the nostalgia of playing Banjo-Kazooie, but Yooka-Laylee simultaneously revives all the bad parts of those games while never quite living up to the good parts. As a spiritual successor, it stands nicely as an homage that didn’t quite hit all of its marks. But as a game on its own, Yooka-Laylee is an okay 3D platformer that unfortunately doesn’t make a strong case for the revival of a genre I love.

The fighting isn’t terrible, it’s just pointless