Like many gamers throughout my age, my gaming prime came on the Nintendo 64. Those late adolescent/early teen many years of my life were spent pouring hour after hour in to the medium's first 3D worlds, and few experiences hold as special a location within my heart as the action-platformers on Nintendo's system. Driven to seize every collectible, I'd spend hours watching counters go up as I crossed items off, only to begin a new save file and do all of it over again. One of my particular favorites was Banjo-Kazooie, therefore i was nothing otherwise intrigued when I found out many of the minds behind that classic from my youth had started a brand new studio, and properly Kickstarted a throwback to that era titled Yooka-Laylee. While it was fun to walk down an up-to-date memory lane, Yooka-Laylee is also a reminder somewhat of methods far we've come in gaming, and just how some things be more effective left in the past.
Yooka-Laylee follows the titular duo of the chameleon (Yooka) and the best bat friend (Laylee) as they have a relaxing day at their new house Shipwreck Creek, which is just outside the corporate Hivory Towers. Meanwhile, the top honcho of the Hivory Towers, Capital B, sets in motion a plan to steal all the world's literature as he looks for one special, magical book. It ought to shock nobody the book is really in Laylee's possession, and she and Yooka do not take kindly to having it suddenly removed from their store. The book's pages-dubbed “Pagies” in the game-don't take to this concept either, ripping themselves using their bindings and scattering concerning the tower. Now, Yooka and Laylee must race to collect all 145 pages, place the book back together, and stop Capital B's plans once and for all.
Yooka-Laylee is a textbook spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie. The names have changed, the worlds have changed, as well as some of the powers have changed, but playing Yooka-Laylee is like forcing yourself to feel déjà vu for 10 to 20 hours for the way many collectibles you go after (a one-hundred percent run took me almost 20 hours) and when you ever played those original games. For me personally, this was great, because I love the colorful characters, the tongue-in-cheek British humor, and the puzzle solving and platforming gameplay that served as staples for Banjo-Kazooie (and continue here). But, after wiping the nostalgia from my eyes like crud caked onto them after oversleeping, I realize there's also some issues with living in yesteryear like Yooka-Laylee does, since the game largely ignores the 20 years of progress games development have made.
The first (and most) evident issue is your camera. Despite your day one patch, I still felt like I had to wrestle with the damn thing like it was 1998 all over again. Here I was, swearing in the TV that the angle wouldn't allow me to see things i desired to see, or it had pulled in too close while Laylee was using her flying power, or that the perspective suddenly shifted, and thus too did the controls. The good past, right? It was a common and accepted occurrence in those days, but we've progressed past that as an industry for probably the most part-yet here was this nuisance from the past cropping up once again.
The controls are also looser than all the bowel movement jokes worked into the game. When they are rarely bad enough to ever actively get in the way of you beating the game, they can get frustrating-especially with Laylee's flying or Yooka's roll move that permits you to traverse steep inclines-when trying to grab collectibles as you just barely over or undershoot your target since it feels like you're fighting the controls a lot more than you ought to be.
Another favorite issue is the game-breaking glitch. Banjo-Kazooie had one that never was fixed (even when it was re-released with Rare Replay) called the Bottles Puzzle Glitch. This would make it if you did a particular puzzle before collecting all 900 music notes in that game, a number of them would magically disappear, and you would be stuck just shy of 100-percent.
In Yooka-Laylee, there appears to be a similar glitch in world four, the Capital Cashino. In order to obtain most Pagies within the level, you have to collect 10 coins on various casino-based mini-games, an enjoyable change of pace that adds variety towards the experience. I discovered late in my playthrough that by destroying from order slots, you can grab a lot of coins at once. Because of that, I finished up making money four Pagies worth of coins at one time, then the little auto-save icon popped up and then faded away. I ran around for a few more minutes looking for (but never finding) more coins, after which I proceeded to show my game off for the night. To my horror, when I returned to Yooka-Laylee the following morning, not only did I not have access to all Pagies I had sold my coins for (I only was credited with two of them), however the coins and also the out of order slots themselves were gone in the world. So, too, was every other coin I had already collected from the world.
Now, this wouldn't stop me from beating the game, but it is clearly a glitch that stops you against getting 100-percent ultimately (like the Bottles Glitch). In my opinion the autosave point happened in-between the Pagie counter increases but once i sold all the coins simultaneously. It had been unfortunate, and it's-admittedly-a large amount of speculation on my small part towards the hows and whys from the matter, but after several hours I resigned myself to starting a brand new game, beginning from scratch, and cashing in 10 coins as soon as I got them each time in Capital Cashino-then getting my full absolutely clear on that playthrough.
Yooka-Laylee does do a fine job of following in the ancestor's footsteps around the positive side of things as well, however. The worlds are absolutely gorgeous, with colors that you didn't know existed just popping off your screen. As well, the soundtrack is amazing; I'm still humming the opening theme while penning this, and honestly you'd be hard-pressed to get the Capital Cashino theme from my head.
The worlds are also absolutely massive. There may be only five of them-six should you count the main hub-and they might start out in a size comparable to what we were used to in the N64 days, but Yooka-Laylee adds variety by permitting you to spend Pagies to quadruple the region of each world, offering up hours of more puzzle-solving and keeping each world from growing stale as a new cavalcade of characters are introduced with much more quests to accomplish.
And, my glitch notwithstanding, each collectible feels challenging, although not ever unobtainable. This is a difficult balance to strike to get individuals to keep playing and not be bored of the collection process, yet Yooka-Laylee makes it feel effortless. There's also a great open-endedness to each challenge, that is something I had forgotten I loved about these games. You can bend the rules once you have the correct tools at your disposal in order to circumvent a few of the difficulty. Actually, I'd recommend doing the bare minimum to open up each basic world and concentrate on obtaining the full repertoire of Yooka and Laylee's moveset. Once you unlock all their abilities, you'll be able to find faster, more efficient methods for solving puzzles and beating bosses whenever you subsequently backtrack.
Speaking of powers, Yooka and Laylee also have a bevy of transformations thanks to a personality named Dr. Puzz that would put Mumbo Jumbo's magic to shame. Plant, animal, as well as vehicle forms allow the duo to understand more about every nook and cranny of each world. There's also an additional power you can utilize over the course of the game called Tonics that provide from more health to more special ability meter, or even just fun things like giving Yooka familiar-looking blue pants to wear-but you are able to only ever get one active at a time.
One other minor addition sees Yooka-Laylee borrow something in the modern era: multiplayer. A polygonal dinosaur character named Rextro is the purveyor of old-school arcade games within the main campaign, and that he also provides up some local co-op and versus multiplayer options for up to four players on a single couch. It's a nice touch from the crew that supposedly always wanted to give a multiplayer aspect of the Banjo games, but tend to never get it done back in the N64 days.
Finally, there is the writing. Personally, I loved a lot of a dark tone of this game. It never takes itself too seriously, and also the toilet humor finds an interesting sweet spot between what we should saw in Conker's Bad Fur Day and Banjo-Kazooie-including within the very first level, in which you have to loosen the bowels of a talking cloud in order to get it to rain or snow on the planet to unlock new challenges. I additionally liked most of the characters, such as the aforementioned Rextro, and Trowzer, the special move-selling snake. Heck, the loading screens poker fun at the sport itself, or how games was once during the N64 era. You may choose to alienate some of your younger audience with references back to the days of memory cards and cartridges, however i found it to be charming.
Yooka-Laylee was an enjoyable stroll down memory lane, but it also serves an unintentional purpose: It reminds us just how much better everything has gotten in games through the years. Yet still be solid in its own right being an action-platformer, its humor and style won't resonate with everyone, there are definitely some technical issues holding it back. However, for those of us who grew up with Banjo-Kazooie, our rose-colored glasses usually stays mostly intact as we hunt for countless collectibles, even while our tastes have matured along with the industry. Hopefully, those not really acquainted with the roots of this game can forgive that, sometimes, we older gamers wanted a talking, constipated cloud to alter the world around us, and concentrate on the platforming instead.
