HISTORY
I’ve played Banjo Kazooie to completition. Twice.
Both on the N64 and the XBLA release pre-Rare Replay.
I’m prefacing this because i definitely fit the profile, i am the target demographic for retro plaftormers like Yooka Laylee, as i love the original Banjo Kazooie, like its sequel and even enjoyed that oversprawling excess that is Donkey Kong 64, and i love 3D collecthathon platformers from the early days of PS and Nintendo 64, especially if made by Rareware/Rare.
Heck, i love them so much i made this rubric. Twice.
When it was announced on Kickstarter, i was excited at the idea of a spiritual sequel to Banjo Kazooie, made by a team of ex-Rare employees, and they also got Grant Kirkhope back for the soundtrack. But i didn’t back it because the idea of Kickstarter and crowdfunding was still new to me, so i just waited for the game to come out.
Which eventually did, to mixed reception.
In hindsight, Yooka Laylee does deserve a spotlight and a place in the history of platforming games, but not for the reasons Playtonic might have liked.
To give some of the younger readers context, back then we were excited because Kickstarter projects would swoop in and serve a specific “niche” of games the big companies simply didn’t made anymore, as in they were chasing the more modern gaming trends of their time.
One of these “underserved niches” was definitely collecthaton platformer in the style of the late 90s and of the 3D kind, as 2D style retro platformer were already starting to get made for the audience that craved them, and aside from Nintendo franchises, 3D platformers as a whole were old hat, left behind by most of the industry as it hurled ever more into F2P monetization and “services”.
People of a certain age were nostalgic for that kind of game, so it makes sense ex-Rare employees band together to make their own modern Banjo Kazooie game, as Microsoft didn’t really do much with the franchise aside from the controversial Nuts & Bolts entry, re-releasing Banjo Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie digitally on Xbox Live Arcade, and having the duo guest star in some other games.
So basically they were sitting on IP s they were never gonna use again, as they do best.
Certainly, they would have to create new characters and a new IP, but it would have been pretty obvious what their intent was, and sure was, so they formed a new studio, Playtonic Games, and decided they were gonna do it themselves if Microsoft wasn’t. (It wasn’t).
Also, yes, i was planning for this review to happen later but since they didn’t delay even further the remaster-enhaced version (i was expecting them to, honestly), Yooka Replaylee, dropping early this month, i’ve decided to review the original version of the game released also physically by Team 17, when i get around to Replaylee it will get its own EXTRA review addendum, but i don’t plan to do that anytime soon, to be quite frank.
PLOT & GRAPHICS
The plot sees the CEO of the Hivory Towers corporation, Capital B, aided by his assistant Dr. Quack as they use a machine to suck up all the books in the world, with the idea being they eventually will get their hands on the “One Book”, a magical book able to rewrite the universe in their favour.
As it happens, the One Book is unknowningly held by Yooka, a chamaleon, and Laylee, a bat, a bizarre duo that is just chilling in their ramshackled house-ship when the One Book starts getting vacuumed, with most of his pages escaping, so Yooka and Laylee set off to retrieve the lost pages of the book, get the book back from Capital B and eventually confront him.
It’s a cute little plot that fits with their intents and serves as a decent enough excuse to have an adventure, not much to say.
I do really like the design for Capital B, Yooka and Laylee not so much but they’re fine, otherwise they did perfectly recreate the aesthetic of 3D Rare platformers, the vibrant colors, the googly eyed sentient objects all speaking in mumbles, with a lot of direct (and indirect) references and callbacks to many old Rare (and even “Ultimate Play The Game”) Ips..
The game is both pretty and ass-looking, since the demon of incosistency (as we’ll see later) haunts this game’s every aspect, looks included, so it will go to looking pretty good, especially for an indie funded project… and then some assets looking untextured or sporting a jarringly lower quality compared to the stuff around them.
The dialogues, for better or worse, feel like they could come out of a Rare 3D platformer of the era, it has the same humour of BK and other old Rare games, the same love for double entendres, juvenile jokes, and overall aged and dated sense of humour, so i can’t fault that much in itself…. if it did age a bit better and wasn’t all coated into this spiteful passive aggressive resentment, so it feels completely empty and sad in the same way as Duke Nukem Forever was.
Just poking fun at way better games, which could make for some fun but just is pathetic and arrogant, since Yooka Laylee itself, on its own merits, it’s not good enough to get away from cracking jokes as other games’ expense, nor the jokes themselves are funny, so its this bitter sassy thing that wants to avenge the “good old days” when it capturing the feeling of those bygone comes as the price of basically encapsulating the worse aspects of that early 3D platformers era.
One thing that i might give a pass just for nostalgia sake it’s the decision to keep the characters speaking in various mumbles, grunts and pitches instead of having actual voice acting, which we have the space for in games now… but it’s also obviously a clever solution to appease nostalgia and not inflate the budget further, since this was an indie production, more or less.
To be frank it does become just plan annoying and tiresome even after a couple of hours of playing (you can turn it off in the options, so there’s that), i would wanna to rip off my own ears, if it weren’t for the honestly perfectly on point Grant Kirkhope score, which it’s good AND hits the nostalgia chords like a champ, it feels just like an old Rare game in terms of soundtrack.
GAMEPLAY & LEVEL DESIGN
After reminiscing on the game for a while, i do echo the sentiment of bitterness that some fellow critics have dissected as the driving motive behind the game, because after a couple of hours it becomes palpable to anyone who has played these kind of games a lot, especially back then.
As sometimes you can really feel the love the people put in a project, you can also tell when the engines are fueled by pure spite, not that the two sentiments are necessarily tied to the quality of the final product, we have plenty of stories about horrendous crunch and development of games that you could argue were definitely crafted with the utmost care and not just factory-assembled.
Problem is, since Banjo Kazooie released, decades of experience and refiniment had happened to the genre, the teething period of trying to translate the platformer in a new dimension was over by a long shot whn Yooka Laylee launched, design solutions have come along and simply made platformers (and other games) better to play overall, as the genre matured out of his formative years of struggle with 3D.
Yooka Laylee instead it’s designed with the arrogance of people that think they know better regardless, rejecting the many improvements and better design choices made over the years, fully loaded on Seymour Skinner’s serum and ready to party exactly like it’s 1998 again.
Well, 2000, to be precise, i’m sure the Playtonic staff meant well, but reality is, they didn’t actually make a new Banjo Kazooie… they made a new Banjo Tooie, as they seem to have deliberately rejected any thing they could learn from modern games in terms of design, and doubled down on many of the issues found in Banjo Kazooie’s sequel and later in Donkey Kong 64.
Also, there’s an underlying unconsistency to the game as a whole, that seeps into every aspect, i’ve alredy said it but it can’t be understated, and that’s the big bad problem, regardless if you agree with my stance on this game being made with bitterness/spite as main fuel or not, because the problems that stem from this general discrepancy are not up to interpretation.
For example, the controls go to sometimes being perfect, sometimes clunky, sometimes they’re absolute shit, especially for some vehicle sections, and platforming itself works fine but still has a certain roughness to the detection, in some istances Yooka still somehow managed to “slip-slide” out of the platform surface. “Rare” istances, i wanna press, but it’s just so indicative of how nothing has really been really that much refined in terms of gameplay from Banjo Kazooie’s release.
You still end up having to be extra-careful with some of the trickier jumps, it’s a thing that will kick in subsciounsly if you have played a lot of early 3D platformer, that instinct to be extra careful because of the slippery-imprecise jumping controls. A thing that was inevitable in the aforementioned era, because there were completely new issues developers HAD to wrestle with over time and resolve. Which they did, but you wouldn’t be able to tell by playing Yooka Laylee, which has retained a lot of the issues of the old school of 3d platformers design.
But first, let’s look at what Yooka and Laylee can do, and i will say it’s a decent ensemble of power-abilities…. mostly, even though i’m not a fan of having these run on an “energy/stamina” bar instead of items/ammo, even if it’s for balancing purposes.
Some of Yooka and Laylee’ abilities do make logical sense given what animals are they (a chameleon and a bat), but the moveset often feels incredibly random and not intuitive, i guess so because they ended up having to explain visually on the “move list info” subscreen that you can lick things such as honeyhives, batteries and some things but not all things, which would be fine it was more consistent.
Also, while the game doesn’t want to spoonfeed you all the time….. i kinda wish it did because most of the times i’m genuinely confused at what abilities i’m gonna need to break some obstacles or get some collectables. I mean, this is a game that lets you lick things to get their properties, meaning you need to lick honeycombs to not slide on ice, lick cannonballs to become metal… but you can’t lick fire to become “fire Yooka” and some things must be destroyed by spitting after eating a black flower thing that’s explosive.
Again, take a look at Banjo Kazooie and the moveset just makes more sense and – most importantly – it doesn’t continously baffle the player for the worse, there is some logic tying the moves together, but if feels like nobody ever told them to cut any power/ability even if it made the game better, or anyone playtested it and noticed the kinda random abilities you obtain or the – again – unconsistent ways they work with the enviromental objects and hazards.
You just wouldn’t even think about such a thing in a better designed game… like Banjo Kazooie.
For example, the Jinjos equivalent each require a different tactic to be caught… no fuckin idea how to get the ones that attack you, idem for the ones that just stand there with their mouth wide open, frenchkissing them doesn’t work, the shockwave thing (as in, the basic one) don’t work.
And again, even the powers are inconsistent, as in you have a shockwave shout attack that can reveal transparent items and destroy blocks… when it can’t. For reasons.
Same “reasons” for which sometime your sloppy attacks don’t connect despite you having hit the enemy for real and being near him when doing so, yet somehow having the hitbox not register it.
There are transformations, but even those are badly handled, requiring a sparse collectable specific to every area the transformations can happen, and honestly they are a letdown as well, controlling like ass, being far less interesting or weird than anything in Banjo Kazooie or Tooie, aside from the helicopter, that one is okay but also lets you bypass some plaforming challenges, because this is the kind of game where they didn’t really care about sequence breaking. Obviously.
The boat one is okay too and at least it get more use than many others transformations, like the plant one, needed for a single sidequest and then only to talk to plants that reveal some secrets to you while in that form, same for the snowmobile transformation, which is fittingly in the ice level but exists only for a convoluted sidequest of snowmen with lost hats, as you can’t destroy the ice piles that contain the hats without the snowmobile form.
I’m not kidding, this transformation exists only for this single fuckin quest, which only nets you 1 meager Pagie (the Jiggy/Super Star/Crystal equivalent).
i honestly didn’t care to search for the specific collectable in each world that you need to transform, after the first one, i mean, why bother? They’re also hidden away well enough, but ironically it’s worse, because you’re not properly rewarded for bothering to find the molecule collectable, as the transformation themselves are often not worthy it.
Doesn’t really matter, as you’ll basically be forced into these for reasons i will explain later, as you will be into what you’d think are gonna be retrostyled challenges played in stand up arcade cabinets, but are actually just shitty mini-games that use the same exact graphics as the main one, come on, at least committ to the shtick, even Nust & Bolt did.
And they are ALL shitty, even stuff like the minecart ride segment in the casinò level is awful, trying to pull a DKC style minecart rail but with worse controls (the irony is rich, but shitty). Ghastly garbage. The lesser worse is the Bee Pop one, a Joust clone, but still, not good.
There are bosses, which might seem obvious but i wasn’t expecting to use a plural, since most of the boss fights are either “hidden” or badly placed into the levels, or can be accessed only when a world has been expanded, and…. and are absolutely nothing special, especially considering how easy can be to sequence break shit, often letting you ignore the attack patterns by just flying over them. Capital B is an exception, for the worse, as we are gonna discuss in the next section.
Ironically its tried too hard to feel like a modern revival of the genres, as its design and overall quality of the content would have been mediocre in 1996, but it feels like it deliberatly didn’t want to learn anything from modern 3D platformers, woobly and plagued by issues the genre left behind in the following decades, instead of improved and refined, and it’s made worse when they keep doing shit like where there was gonna be a boss fight, they whip out a trivia quiz about things you have done, seen and collected in the game up to that point.
Yes, Banjo Kazooie did that, as in, before the final boss, as in once, and not right away, while trying to justify it by pointing out how it IS a cheap way to make some content, to pad out the experience on the quick and cheap…. but it still does exactly that, so fuck you, Yooka Laylee, as the game does it twice to avoid having mini-bosses.
you wanna do it for a joke, do it at the beginning and then set up a second one only to have a metagag in how the trivia quiz part of the game break forever… but to actually make the joke of stupid trivia quiz that require you to keep count of how many things you collected exactly in a collectathon AND still make you do a stupid trivia quiz is just vile and defeats any wit to your “joke”. Insincere douches.
The most modern features are the Tonics, which are power-ups you can unlock by doing some in-game objectives (like “kill 10 defense bot enemies” “collect x number of Pagies in the hub world”, etc) and can equip by talking to the vending machine character (called “Vendi” because we stopped caring at this point) you find in the overworld and in the levels.
Some are gags like the “vintage skin” that makes it looks like a Nintendo 64 game (which isn’t even that good, as it looks more like a early PS1 game, and BK looked way better on the N64), others are more useful, by giving you extra health, reduce energy comsuption for the rolling move, cancel fall damage from huge heights, and so on.
The main hub it’s a utter mess to navigate as well, not that big so eventually you’ll learn where to go, but it’s still a badly designed mess, way worse than Grunty’s castle thing in the original BK, to be honest. It’s a struggle to even find your way through the random and far from organical design of Capital B hive-workplace in order to even find the levels.
Might have been alleviated by a map, but fuck it, who needs it, even when it’s a good idea?
You might think it gets better over time as you get used to it, and i though i was becoming accostumed, by it only gets worse the more worlds you unlock.
I thought i somehow got the jist of how the areas are connected…. until i just accidentally backtracked to the beginning part of the hub world and had no clear idea how to get back to the inner parts where the last level “portals” are located, even 10 hours i could barely manage to navigate this mess of a hub world. It’s impressive how bad it actually is, even with the pretty direct signpoisting.
Not that the levels themselves are well designed, honestly the best ones are the first two, the ones that they kept showing pre-launch, almost as if Playtonic realized this too.
Also, remember how Banjo Tooie had the issue of having too much backtracking? Same problem here, with plenty of occasion when you accidentally waste a lot of time in a platforming sequence only to realize you don’t have a random power/abilities you still can’t even know or access because Trowzer sells it in another world you haven’t unlocked yet.
The game fumbles often at even communicating what the hell it wants you to do, to the point that sometimes the game has you resolve a puzzle… if you can even guess what the hell the puzzle is supposed to be. It’s really that bad, and exploring the areas it’s made worse by a very shitty camera that also seems to come from the mid-90s and should have been left there.
DIFFICULTY & LENGHT
This was clearly a game made for people that grew up on 3D platformers in the 90s, and while it’s not very hard, the challenge is not the issue, is that it’s often a lot more befuddling and frustrating than genuinely challenging, which it can be, but only in some rare occasions,
This stems due to the fact the game doesn’t explain shit well, it’s not very well designed, so you’ll be stuck trying to figure how what the game wants from you, which often isn’t self explanatory at all since some abilities can be used in not obvious way you’re not even vaguely hinted at,
Plus it’s also a game that’s very easy to sequence break and destroy any challenge by bypassing some obstacles, and explained before, the combo of it relying heavy on backtracking and also having an horrendously designed hub with no map, so most of the time you’ll be lost trying to figure out how to get back to a previously unlocked part of the hub to access the levels themselves, and no, there are no fast travel points that would have avoided a lot of wasted time, or looking at guides.
After a while even making some small progress is a chore, an utter slog due to some pagies being tied to horrendous but practically mandatory mini-games (i hate the minecart ride in the casinò level, fuck it to hell) that are so badly designed and shit to control you will get stuck on them for hours.
One would almost believe it’s purposefully designed so to have you not notice that the “expand” gimmick, while making fittingly (as you’re restoring to the original contents the books containing these worlds), it’s an obvious cheap solution to try and mask how few worlds are actually there, as they amount to 5, and i wouldn’t care less about them not being at least 9 like in the original Banjo Kazooie, if they were good.
They aren’t, and it just feels like they just smash 2 cliched thematizations in one of each world to save budget and hope it will freshen up things by just putting things into a blender and pushing the mix button, but the results are neither great or memorable, or even ok, and it’s shame because the basic satisfaction of getting collectibles is here, the elements are all in place, but there’s very little sense of cohesion even to the worlds, as they recycle many NPC characters by having them travel through the levels, which is a cheap cop-out with the side effect of making the worlds themselves even less memorable, as the NPC charactes often don’t even relate to the location in any logical sense, they’re just there, often to do things that don’t even fit with the theming.
see the pig knights you can meet in the jungle level or the casinò, there’s no medieval pig world to speak of, for example, no “Hamelot”.
Which actually makes the fact the hub world its so confusing… even worse, there’s no reason it should be this winding and confusingly built hubworld for a meager 5 world/levels.
It’s also an insecure game, because it does one of the worse things a 3D platformer collectathon can do, and this is basically locking the door for the final boss under an insane amount of collectibles requirements, in this case needing you to at least have 100 pagies… out of 145.
It’s always telling they don’t really believe in the quality of the game when they force you to also generously sample the “sidecorn” so much you might as well go for 100% completition.
Yeah, the final boss door will basically force you to almost complete the game to even finish it.
ARE YOU INSANE PLAYTONIC? Are you actually insane?
Yes, Rare did love trolling players occasionally, like the fake out in the final boss fight of Donkey Kong Country, but problem is, you can get away with it if the game is good or better.
When you put out such mild to subpar outdated stuff, you really can’t afford it.
Heck, not even Donkey Kong 64 did this.
Just slightly worse than the shit the first Rayman game pulled. Just barely.
Apparently there is a glitch to exploit and skip this utterly INSANE requirement… or there was, i haven’t checked yet, but apparently it’s still there.
But i didn’t use that, i did it proper, because i’m a stubborn bastard, and it took me 20/21 hours or something to be able to enter Capital B.’s lair. 22 to beat it alltogether.
And of course the final boss is… not that bad, but not good either, preying mostly on being longer than necessary, with you having to face all phases in one go obviously making it harder.
Still, this thing alone it’s just spiteful, just forcing you to go through most of the “optional” sidecorn because they couldn’t be fucked to make more levels or – more importantly – give a good progression-structure to what they had. Like, some of the bosses (which only appear after upgrading a world) make sense in both looks and how they’re placed in the level, some not at all.
Hilariously, you don’t even need to face all the bosses before the final one, you just need to accrue the 100 pagie quota and then you can face the final boss. Absurd shit.
Even more absurd is that i lied: you don’t need to beat all the bosses, BUT you still have to encounter them and face them at least once in order to enter the final boss room.
After passing the last annoying trivia quick, after the game said there would be no more of those.
Not that i was surprised when the game pulled this off and said “WE LIED” about saying that the previous one being the last quiz of the game, i mean, Banjo Kazooie did it, so of course Yooka Laylee does it, regardless it’s outdated, retrograde or bad in any kind of hindsight,
Also, apparently some of the trophies are glitched, i remember having beaten the casinò boss but i didn’t got the trophy for it, i could check but who cares.
There is also local multiplayer, as a 2 players co-op play, but not a full-on co-op, as player 2 controls a swarm of bees and basically works like an assist, like in Super Mario Galaxy, but worse, and a 2-4 players version of the Rextro “arcade” minigames found in the campaign… no thanks.
OVERALL EVALUATION
You might think i hate Yooka Laylee… i kinda do, as in, its not even that bad, but given the sentiment and people behind it, it’s beyond disappointing that what they managed to do with this game is a big ass monkey paw of a game.
It looks, sounds and plays like a turn of the millenium 3D platformer made by Rare, heck, it has a lot of the original creative team members back exactly for this, and unlike other Kickstarter projects, it didn’t actually scam or confound anyone… but it also reminded people that not all tales like this end up with a big concert in the church that saves the orphanage.
In hindsight it’s exactly what we were likely to get with a developer team made of people that specialized in a specific kind of game that made them famous…. but were stuck in the glory of the past in terms of everything, never made a game in decades, and it shows because they’re simply stuck in 1999, that specific year because the game does remind me more of Banjo Tooie, due to its flaws and backtracking, more than Banjo Kazooie, which aged like fine wine.
The bottom line is that Yooka Laylee IS a failure because it ends up making you wish you just loaded up Banjo Kazooie or its sequel again, even if the game it’s just subpar.
Not completely unsatisfactory, there’s still some tiny enjoyment in hearing the “item get” jingle but it’s embarassing “their” old ass 20+ game just clears the floor with their new one, production values aside Yooka Laylee just amplifies the main issue sof Banjo Tooie without the excuses that could have been made back in 1999, exposing a lot of issues that are no fault of the game’s legacy but just its own, especially the bad, outdated AND simplistic level design that wouldn’t have impressed much even back in the N64 days.
It’s all so uninspired and hugely disappointing, in short.
In a way, this game is important as a memento to the dangers of nostalgia and kickstarter projects run by people that thought “i can do better, and i can do it with only a fraction of the people that we had when we worked at the huge megasuccessful company back in the olden golden days”.
an Itagaki tale, if you will.
All made more bitterly hilarious when you consider there’s a Shovel Knight cameo, that’s a great fucking game that draws from the old school and the nostalgia for the NES era, but in a good way.
At the end, Capital B and Dr. Quack get blast-launched into the magic book, presumably sealed there until a sequel did happen, with Yooka-Laylee and The Impossible Lair.
LEGACY
While the game did eventually get a sort of sequel in the Yooka Laylee and The Impossible Lair, Playtonic Games did also work as a publisher for fellow indie games like Lil’ Gator Game or BPM: Bullets Per Minute, but also the 3D retro platformer Demon Turf and its expansion/sequel Demon Turf Neon Splash, before announcing they would eventually go back on Yooka Laylee and remake it, that being the remake-remaster-enhanced edition-director’s cut Yooka Replay-Lee, because this isn’t a big AAA studio and they want-need some profit to work on a direct, 3D style sequel to Yooka Laylee, and while i will check out the remaster-remake later on a “when i can” basis, i’ll commend the effort to not dig their heads into the sand and ignore the criticisms.
Because ultimately i believe the team at Playtonic can do better than this, i do believe that even “old dogs” can learn new trick without losing their identity to appease the market.
Wise Cafe (International) 