Yooka-Laylee Review

Banjo on a budget

(This review contains minor spoilers!)

          Rare is a company that’s really been put through the wringer over the past few years. Once Nintendo’s right hand man during the N64 days, they suffered a number of setbacks and problems after they were completely purchased by Microsoft in 2002. After a long string of good but underselling titles (I’m still waiting on a third Viva Piñata), the legendary developer behind such classics as Goldeneye 007, the original Donkey Kong Country trilogy and of course the Banjo-Kazooie franchise was essentially sent to the gaming salt mines, forced to create tech demos for Microsoft’s new Kinect peripheral.

          At this the Rare braintrust jumped ship and decided to form their own indie development studio known as Playtonic Games. There they used the power of crowdfunding to create Yooka-Laylee, the spiritual successor to Banjo that Microsoft apparently didn’t want them to make.

          Fast forward two years, and the game has finally arrived. So where does Yooka-Laylee lie on the Kickstarter-funded-game spectrum? Is it as successful as Shovel Knight or as dreadful as Mighty No. 9?

           Unfortunately, in my opinion it's closer to the latter game, although it’s not nearly as much of a disaster as Mighty was. Yooka-Laylee legitimately feels like it could’ve been made in 1998, but I don’t really think that’s a good thing. Yooka’s main goal is to remind players of how great Banjo-Kazooie was back in the day, and I feel it accomplished that with me. In my entire time playing I found I’d much rather be playing Banjo than this worse homage to it.

          The game stars the titular chameleon Yooka and his bat friend Laylee. The two of them spring into action when the nefarious corporate overlord Capital B steals the magic pages of a mysterious tome with intents to use it to take over the world. It’s up to the daring duo to collect all the pagies (as they’re called) to defeat Capital B because…I honestly don’t know. The two of them are never really given a reason as to why they’re on this mission. They just kind of go chasing the book because it’s something to do. Granted, the story isn’t exactly what’s important in a colourful cartoony platformer, but I wanted more of a reason to be going on this quest. At least Banjo had you rescuing your sister, so you had a reason to care.

          And since this game so desperately wants to remind you about Banjo’s glory days, that’s what I’ll be comparing it to.

          The first thing you’ll notice upon starting up the game is that Yooka-Laylee employs the same goofy gibberish-text speech in the dialogue that Banjo did. But for whatever reason, this time around Playtonic decided to make all the character noises way more annoying than they ever were in Banjo. Expect to hear lots of screams, whines and moans throughout your playthrough, enough to make me almost want to mute the sound.

          The only reason I didn’t was because of the soundtrack, composed by Grant Kirkhope of Banjo, Viva Piñata and Donkey Kong 64 fame among others. This time around the music is…passable. It suits the atmosphere fine enough, but it’s not memorable the way the music in Banjo was. While Banjo has extremely hummable tracks like Gruntilda’s Lair, Mumbo’s Mountain and Freezeezy Peak, the songs in Yooka mostly serve as just atmosphere.

          The visual design isn’t bad, but it’s not exactly a treat to the eyes either. The game looks about the same as Super Mario Sunshine being run on an HD emulator. It’s not great, but for an indie game bending itself backwards trying to make you nostalgic it’s not as bad as it could be. The character models, on the other hand, are just depressing. They range from stiff to full-on lazy in their design. Some NPCs are just random objects with googly eyes pasted on, as if the designers ran out of time making characters and had to throw something together at the last minute. All the NPCs act like animatronics out of a bad Disney World attraction. They remain completely still aside from an animation or two looped infinitely, and when you walk up to them a spotlight shines to let you know that they can be interacted with. You never feel like this is a real world you’re existing in. Instead the worlds of Yooka-Laylee feel like something out of a Six Flags themed area.

          Speaking of the worlds, they’re just ghastly in all respects. The hub world is atrocious, quite possibly the worst I’ve ever seen. It’s a maze of twisting hallways, ramps, gaps and dead ends, and you can never tell if you’re going the right direction. At one point I got so lost I needed to consult YouTube just so I could find Level 2! Comparing this to Gruntilda’s Lair from Banjo-Kazooie, while that hub was large and cavernous, the pathways were clear enough that you always had an idea of where you were going. Capital B’s fortress feels more like the labyrinths from Breath of the Wild, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

          As for the themed worlds you visit to collect pagies, I only got to the third one before I gave up on the game. Apparently they only get worse from there, so make of that what you will. None of them are memorable by any means, but they all share one big problem: they’re way too big and confusing to navigate. It’s 2017. If you’re going to give us giant worlds and not provide a map of some description, go home and rethink your life.

          So yeah, the worlds are enormous and without a map system there’s extreme difficulty in figuring out not only where you need to go but where you’ve already been. Landmarks are few and far between, making everything look frustratingly similar. You could be running around in circles looking for the next pagie and have no idea you’re doing so.

          And that’s just the design aspects. We haven’t even gotten started talking about the gameplay yet.

          Remember how at the top of the review I said this game feels like it could’ve been made in 1998? I’m talking about the gameplay when I say that. The platforming is archaic, the combat is brainless, and the camera is just plain sad.

          Just as with Banjo, Yooka is a collect-the-doodads game. Collecting pagies allows you to either open new worlds or expand the ones you’ve already unlocked. There’s also quills scattered around, which you can use to purchase new moves and abilities from Trowzer the snake. While collecting pagies is initially as satisfying as getting jiggies in Banjo, it quickly becomes a chore as Playtonic does everything in their power to keep you away from your papery prize. Most are trapped in cages and need to be unlocked via puzzles. The only problem is that Yooka does an awful job at telling you what the puzzles are most of the time. More often than not you’ll come across a caged pagie and have absolutely no idea what you’re supposed to do to free it, even after searching the surrounding area.

          There are also collectible ghosts, but god knows how you’re supposed to get them. They all seem to have certain tasks tied to them, but the game decided not to tell me what those tasks were so I just left them alone.

          Most often you need to complete a platforming challenge of some description, but that falls flat on its face as well. Just like the rest of the game, the platforming physics would feel more at home on the N64 than a modern console. It’s extremely hard to figure out just where Yooka currently is, making precise jumps a near impossibility. The camera doesn’t help either. No matter what you do it will always be firmly stuck behind Yooka, limiting your field of view and not allowing you to try different angles for the platforming. Aiming and firing with power-ups is also horrendous, as you often need to shoot buttons to open doors with such small hitboxes that you need to jiggle Yooka back and forth until he’s directly facing the button itself, and then firing.

          Oh, and while we’re on the subject of power-ups, they’re a complete joke. Once purchased early on in the game, Yooka gains the ability to eat certain flowers that temporarily give him fire, water, bomb, ice powers and so on. When I say temporarily though, I mean it. You have these elemental abilities for less than a minute, and Yooka’s absolute favourite puzzle is the “grab the ability, make a mad dash to the puzzle you need to use it on, and hope you get it right” puzzle. This is a trick the game pulls with extreme frequency, and it results in a lot of frustration from the player as oftentimes the puzzle is miles away from the power-up flower and if you make a single mistake you need to do the whole thing all over again until you’re pixel perfect. Usually even when you complete the marathon sprint to the puzzle perfectly, the power-up on the ability runs out of time while you’re trying to use it on the puzzle!

          But amazingly that’s not even the worst part! The combat manages to climb to the peak of the garbage and crown itself the absolute most dreadful part of the game. The enemies are extraordinarily dull, with most of them just being the same designs repeated ad nauseam. They brainlessly run at you with all the intelligence of a zombie from a bad asset flip on Steam, and all you have to do is use Yooka’s spin attack to dispatch them. But even that doesn’t work, as sometimes the spin attack fails to connect for whatever reason. You can be right up in range of a little goblin guy, but the spin will phase right through him and you’ll take a hit because of it.

          The only other variety Yooka has are minigames, but they all feel like something you could find for free on the App Store. There’s a top-down kart racer that controls like garbage, a Temple Run knockoff that controls like garbage, a hurdle race that controls like garbage, and more. Notice a pattern there? All the minigames are boring and uninspired, but they also come equipped with multiplayer functionality in case you’re ever throwing a house party and really want your guests to leave.

          Yooka-Laylee’s biggest problem is that it never allows itself to be its own game. It’s too busy trying to remind players of how Rare struck gold in the 90’s to actually do something new with the Banjo collectathon concept. In the six hours I played of the game, not once did it take me by surprise or introduce something I wasn’t expecting, and by the time I called it quits the game felt like it was just going through the motions as it marched ever closer to the end credits. This, plus the less-than-stellar aesthetic, bad map design and just plain terrible gameplay, leaves Yooka-Laylee as just another game with a nostalgic façade and a yawn-worthy core.

          Still, despite my many criticisms the game has enough charm that I’d say it’s not a complete wash. If you’re a massive fan of Banjo and Rare’s glory days, I’d say it’s worth giving a chance. Just maybe rent it first or wait for a sale instead of buying at full price. Everybody else on the other hand, if you really want to play a platformer, save your money and hope Super Mario Odyssey turns out good.

FINAL SCORE

4/10

Mediocre