I had barely made it a few minutes into my two-hour
demo of Yooka-Laylee when I realized I was already chuckling to myself with a big, wide
grin on my face.
For all the mystery that still surrounds Yooka-Laylee’s content and development beyond the first major
world, one thing was made clear to me in the game’s opening moments: the charm and very
particular vibe that has caused Banjo-Kazooie to live on in the hearts of gamers the world
over absolutely lives on in Yooka-Laylee, and that alone is cause for celebration — and
that’s before I’ve even started talking about the game itself!
Let’s back up for a second.
Yooka-Laylee is a Kickstarted 3D platformer serving as a spiritual successor to fan-favorite
Rare adventure Banjo-Kazooie, and make no mistake — much of what you see in Yooka-Laylee’s
opening moments is designed specifically to tickle the nostalgia centers of those who
look back on the bear and bird’s adventures with fond remembrance.
Even the file select screen, punctuated by cute animations of Yooka and Laylee relaxing
or goofing off depending on the highlighted file, is a direct callback to Banjo-Kazooie’s
memorable opening moments.
And that’s just one of the many ways in which Yooka-Laylee demonstrates a clear love
and understanding of the 3D platformer as defined by Nintendo 64-era Rare.
There’s a reason these familiar elements are so on point — some of Yooka-Laylee’s
development team at Playtonic Games is made up of former Rare staff members who actually
worked on Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie back in the day.
Fortunately, the existence of Rare DNA within the development team has not prevented Playtonic
from veering away from tradition when appropriate, as Yooka-Laylee takes great pains to carve
out its own niche above and beyond just being a game that walks, talks, and plays like Banjo-Kazooie.
Of course, most of what you’ll do in Yooka-Laylee’s opening hours will be familiar to Banjo-Kazooie
fans.
After getting used to the controls in a small, sectioned-off segment of the hub world called
Shipwreck Creek, you’re given your basic moves by a snake named Trowzer — a shady
serpentine salesman who serves as Yooka-Laylee’s equivalent of Bottles the mole — and you
venture into the game’s main hub world, Hivory Towers.
You know, because the main villain is a bee, bees live in hives, and this “hive” is
the headquarters of a big corporation…
yeah, this is pretty much going to be Andre’s dream game.
Once inside, things keep going as you’d expect: you learn another move and explore
the beginning area of Hivory Towers until you find your first Pagie, thereby granting
access to the game’s first world, Tribalstack Tropics.
Then it’s off to Tribalstack Tropics to collect more Pagies so you can unlock more
worlds in Hivory Towers… and it’s at that juncture where the central points of divergence
from the Banjo-Kazooie formula become readily apparent.
As it turns out, Pagies are a bit more versatile than their equivalent, Jiggies, in Banjo-Kazooie.
You can use them to unlock new worlds, sure — OR you can use them to expand worlds you
have already unlocked, paving the way to new areas in those worlds, complete with unfamiliar
places to explore, new challenges to attempt, and — of course — new Pagies to collect.
And here’s the kicker: there’s never any wrong choice.
As opposed to Banjo-Kazooie’s more guided structure, Playtonic wants players to chart
their own course through Yooka-Laylee.
There are shades of an open-world approach here, but it’s not quite that; this is still
very much a 3D platformer based in a hub world that branches off into several themed worlds,
but the difference here is that you have far more freedom in how you approach those worlds
than you ever did in the Banjo games.
Do you venture forth in a linear fashion, from the first world to the second and so
forth?
Do you fully expand and complete Tribalstack Tropics before moving onto icy wonderland
Glitterglaze Glacier, the newly-revealed second world?
Or do you take an entirely different approach, playing the worlds out of order a little bit
at a time?
The way you progress throughYooka-Laylee will depend heavily upon which moves you decide
to purchase from Trowzer in each world, and once again, there’s no wrong choice here.
Moves are purchased with Quills, a common collectible in each world that Banjo-Kazooie
fans will recognize as being similar to Notes.
Except instead of Notes restricting progress behind numerical gates, Quills work in the
opposite way: they enable progress in specific ways, and the way you progress through the
game might be very different from my progression based on what moves you unlock in what order.
The cleverly named Play Tonics represent another unique element of Yooka-Laylee that brings
player choice to the forefront.
These Play Tonics are given to you by Vendi, a Spongebob Squarepants-looking NPC you’ll
find in each world.
You can only have one Play Tonic active at a time, and they affect the gameplay in various
interesting ways — one lets you explore underwater areas more easily by increasing
Yooka-Laylee’s air supply, for example, while another gives you an extra point on
your health meter, and yet others simply add different graphical effects or filters.
The game clearly communicates what criteria you need to meet to unlock each Play Tonic,
too, so in this way you can focus on unlocking the Play Tonics that complement your gameplay
style or appeal to you the most — which might be totally different from the Play Tonics
I go after first.
It’s a refreshingly different approach for a 3D platformer, and one that I’m looking
forward to seeing play out over the course of the whole game.
There are potential pitfalls, of course — for example, Yooka-Laylee consists of five much
larger worlds to explore as opposed to the Banjo games’ ten smaller worlds each, likely
as a result of the more nonlinear approach to progression here — but Playtonic promised
me that despite the overall world count being lower, there are so many disparate areas to
explore in those worlds as you expand them that Yooka-Laylee still remains a bigger,
more ambitious game than its spiritual predecessors.
There isn’t much to say about the nuts and bolts — pun not intended — of the gameplay
itself: it’s really, really on-point.
Playtonic clearly know what they’re doing here; the controls are absolutely spot on,
Yooka-Laylee’s various moves are fun to use and have exactly the right amount of visual
and tactile feedback, and the game just “feels” right.
Within minutes of the game relinquishing control to me following the opening cutscenes, I was
traipising about the world like a pro, double-jumping to and fro while deftly swinging the camera
mid-jump.
As a 3D platformer, Yooka-Laylee feels every bit like its forebears in all the right ways.
Simply existing in this world and running around in it feels great.
The camera did have a rare tendency to act up and get caught in or between certain areas
in the environment, but those instances were absolutely the exception, not the rule.
The one basic action returning Banjo fans might have trouble getting acclimated to is
swimming.
Frankly, I hated the swimming controls at first; ascending and descending are mapped
to their own buttons, while you use the analog stick to adjust the direction you’re swimming.
It felt totally wrong and unintuitive until I got used to it, and even though I have a
handle on the swimming controls now, I’m still not sure if I like them.
But at the very least, I don’t dislike them like I did initially.
In my experience, it’s when Yooka-Laylee deviates from its 3D platforming core and
tries to shake things up that the gameplay starts to suffer.
For example, some sections of Hivory Towers are gated off by mandatory quiz segments called
“Dr. Quack’s Quiz Time,” where lovable underling Dr. Quack quizzes Yooka and Laylee
about the things they’ve done, seen, and heard so far.
Naturally, the questions and their answers can vary from player to player.
Now, perhaps it’s just because I was constantly under the looming constraint of a two-hour
time limit, but the quiz segment I played wasn’t fun and came off to me as temporarily
breaking an otherwise sublime gameplay flow, and I just wanted to get it over with.
Though clearly the inspiration here, Grunty’s Furnace Fun this certainly is not — whereas
that felt like a true culmination of Banjo-Kazooie’s adventure, Dr. Quack’s Quiz Time feels like
a sequence that Playtonic haphazardly included just for the sake of adding a “Diverse gameplay!”
checkbox to the game’s package.
The wonderfully-named Rextro Sixtyfourus is another offender here, at least early on.
You’ll come across the comically polygonal NPC in each main world, where you’ll have
to find and give him a Play Coin in order to play one of his retro-inspired arcade games.
Complete the game’s challenge, and you’ll get a Pagie — along with the promise of
more difficult times and scores to shoot for in future attempts, of course.
But here’s the problem.
The first Rextro game I came across, “Kartos Karting” — a riff on the top-down arcade
racers of yesteryear like Super Off-Road — is just dreadful to play.
The controls are way too loose — looser than the game that inspired it — and it
just didn’t feel like there was much point to it all other than Playtonic being able
to say “see, we have minigames too!”
Of course, Kartos Karting is just one of Rextro’s games and the others may end up being a lot
of fun.
Still, I couldn’t help but notice that the only times Yooka-Laylee really suffered for
me from a gameplay perspective was when it tried to break its own flow and be something
other than a 3D platformer.
Playtonic asked that we keep story spoilers to a minimum for this preview, so we’re
not allowed to talk about much of what happens in the cutscenes I saw.
And GameXplain isn’t in the business of handing out unnecessary spoilers anyway, so
all I’ll say is this: central bad guy Capital B and his chief underling Dr. Quack gave me
a lot of laughs in the early going and seem to capture that same overtly cartoonish charm
that made Gruntilda and Klungo such effective, entertaining foils to Banjo and Kazooie back
in the day.
If there’s one thing Yooka-Laylee makes abundantly clear about its story from the
get-go, it’s that it doesn’t take itself seriously — and neither should you.
Yooka-Laylee wears its whimsy on its sleeve, handily combining a family friendly world
and characters with vaguely lowbrow British humour - that’s “humour” with a “U,”
by the way - which often breaks the fourth wall and pokes fun at the game industry at
large.
It’s sharp stuff so far, clearly meant to appeal to older players while keeping the
younger crowd engaged in blissful ignorance.
If the game’s opening hours are any indication, Yooka-Laylee’s writing is mostly funny and
on-point despite my spying a few typos in the mix.
It seems strange, then, that a game with such a freewheeling approach to its story forces
you to sit through its cutscenes — whether you want to or not.
While I’m not in the business of skipping cutscenes myself, I only had two hours to
play the game so I figured I’d mostly skip them for now and watch them when playing my
own copy of the game later on.
But not only does Yooka-Laylee not allow you to skip cutscenes, you’re often not even
permitted to speed up the dialogue within those cutscenes either.
While this is also true of Banjo-Kazooie, I would have liked to see certain elements
of the past stay there, the forced approach to cutscenes and dialogue speed being one
of them.
Fortunately, for those faster readers out there you can still speed up the dialogue
outside of cutscenes, so it’s not a total loss.
Speaking of dialogue, no Yooka-Laylee preview would be complete without mentioning the game’s
“voices,” which aren’t so much voices as they are random grunts and sounds mixed
together to create hilarious approximations of voices.
It’s the exact same approach taken by Banjo-Kazooie and certain other games like Okami, and it’s
played to wonderful comedic effect in Yooka-Laylee.
On the other hand, if you’re one of those people who have always found such “voices”
annoying, Yooka-Laylee isn’t likely to change your mind.
Much ado has been made about original Banjo-Kazooie composer Grant Kirkhope being brought on to
do Yooka-Laylee’s soundtrack, with contributions from fellow Rare alumnus David Wise — and
that’s exactly why I’m surprised to report that I’m somewhat underwhelmed by Yooka-Laylee’s
soundtrack so far.
While I do want to stress that the music here is not bad by any means, Kirkhope seems to
be going for a very different style here, forgoing Banjo-Kazooie’s strong, earwormy
melody lines in favor of a more ambient, film score-like approach.
In other words, the soundtrack here seems intentionally relegated to the background
instead of being more or less its own character like it was in the Banjo games.
Even main level themes have a surprisingly quiet, pervasive feel to them, and how you
feel about this will depend on your personal tastes in music and how married you are to
the idea of Kirkhope producing another Banjo-Kazooie-style soundtrack.
That said, I’m happy to report that Yooka-Laylee does once again have a dynamic soundtrack
in the sense that you’ll often hear the same central melody repurposed in different
ways as you explore different parts of a particular world.
Visually, Yooka-Laylee has a very straightforwardly clean, attractive look to it without necessarily
pushing the envelope.
It’s exactly how you’d expect a well-funded indie 3D platformer to look, and while it’s
not likely to win any awards for cutting-edge graphics, it’s consistently pleasing to
look at.
The worlds Yooka and Laylee explore really pop thanks to the cartoonishly exaggerated
designs of the characters populating them, and the game’s bright, vivid color palette
in general is a pleasure to behold.
Everything runs at a mostly smooth 60 frames per second, with occasional frame drops here
and there.
That said, special attention should be lavished on Yooka and Laylee themselves.
They really look fantastic, with all their various little animations going a long way
toward communicating their different personalities while also demonstrating their close friendship.
If you’re not smiling the first time Yooka suffers fall damage from a particularly long
drop and Laylee gently pulls her disoriented buddy up from the ground, I just don’t know
if we can be friends.
In closing, perhaps the best thing I can say about my time with a near-final retail build
of Yooka-Laylee is that two hours wasn’t nearly enough.
I found myself repeatedly checking the time during the demo, knowing my time with the
game would be coming to an end all too soon.
While I had a few minor issues as outlined previously and it remains to be seen how Yooka-Laylee’s
more player-directed approach to Banjo-Kazooie’s blueprints will ultimately work out, I left
my demo unable to think of much else besides how dearly I had missed games like this and
how much I’m dying to explore every last corner of this game.
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