Yoku's Island Express Reviews

Yoku's Island Express is an enjoyable experience from the moment you step foot on the island. The combination of gameplay styles makes for a unique experience. Coupled with its’ relaxing tone and brilliant presentation, it is a real joy to explore Mokumana. There are a few niggles but in terms of enjoyment, Yoku sticks the landing.

With only a few small niggles to complain about, Yoku’s Island Express successfully merges pinball and platforming without ever making the former feel like a gimmick. Its beautiful presentation and fun, engaging exploration blend together to create a truly unique experience.

Yoku's Island Express is the perfect mixture of pinball and video games. Taking the best of both worlds and dropping it into a charming setting filled with likable characters makes for a relaxing romp that shouldn't be missed.

Adventure and pinball combine to captivating effect.

Yoku’s Island Express is a delight, plain and simple. It’s gorgeous, plays beautifully, and I hope it’s the start of a new franchise, because I want to play a lot more of this.

Metroidvania pinball is definitely an unorthodox concept for a video game. However, Yoku's Island Express presents one of the most original and addictive indie game formulas ever so get your flipper fingers ready and prepare for a memorable adventure.

A strangely successful mix of genres that plays both a mean pinball and a highly competent game of Metroidvania, and all wrapped up in some utterly charming presentation.

Yoku’s Island Express brought something to the table few games, even among those I enjoyed, have managed to recently - a true sense of freshness. It really is unlike most games on the market, and it manages to grow beyond this defining gimmick, nailing almost every other aspect. Between the fantastic gameplay, lovely presentation and endearing characters, minor faults like excessive backtracking and a somewhat flat main storyline are negligible.

Yoku’s Island Express is a novel Metroidvania-pinball hybrid that stands out as something wholly unique. It blends those clashing genres with a beautiful island style, and its satisfying flippers and bumpers make uncovering its wide island a ton of fun. Retreading completed areas while hunting for secrets can occasionally get stale, but Yoku’s Island Express has a refreshingly positive attitude that kept me smiling the whole way through. Yoku's Island Express is out today.

Yoku’s Island Express is a beauteous, aurally delightful treat that riffs off the Metroidvania template and pinball tables in a smart and playful manner. It’s somewhat tempered by the dual frustrations of the pinball mechanic’s need for constant precision and a lacklustre fast-travel system that leaves you having to cover the same ground over and over, ultimately taking what could have been an amazing game, and making it a good one.

Because many video games lean on familiar gameplay loops, archetypal characters, and genre conventions, when you're reviewing them it can sometimes feel like you're saying exactly the same thing about a game that you already wrote about previously. But every now and again you'll have to write a sentence during a review that you know you've never written before, and you'll likely never have to write again. This is one of those times. Yoku's Island Express is a 2D, open world, Metroidvania, pinball game starring a dung beetle postman dragged into a battle for the fate of the world on his first day on the job. Beat that.

A cool hybrid of platforming, puzzling and pinball, Yoku's Island Express is a bit of a one-off, and therefore well worth seeking out.

If you can wrap your brain around what developer Villa Gorilla calls an “open-world Metroidvania pinball adventure,” and you don’t mind playing as a spry dung beetle, you’re in for a unique and wholly satisfying treat. Yoku’s Island Express turns the simple action of hitting a ball with a flipper into a joyous journey through a world filled with quests and secrets galore. This odd mash-up of genres works better than you might think. The player assumes the role of Yoku, who happens to be tethered to a ball of petrified feces. As disgusting as this object may sound, Yoku uses it as a means of locomotion. He’s tied to it via a short rope, and he mostly has to hold on for dear life. Yoku has just taken on the role of Mokumana Island’s postman, and he needs to cover ground quickly if he wants to deliver mail before the island god brings torrential rain and quakes. Yoku can freely push the ball to the left or right, but can’t jump or do much of anything other than blow on a whistle. When stacked up against the Samuses and Alucards of games of this ilk, he’s easily the weakest and most useless of the lot. Thankfully, the world itself is filled with colored flippers that can propel Yoku and his ball wherever he needs to go.

It’s rare a game is as endlessly joyous as Yoku’s Island Express. It’s a game without stressors; without any grinding annoyances that get in the way of your enjoyment. Devoid of any real combat, it’s a laid-back experience that lets you approach it at your own pace. Once I picked it up I found it very hard to put down, and for good reason. Yoku’s Island Express oozes charm and love from every pixel; it’s plain to see how much care Villa Gorilla, the game’s developer, has put into this. It’s a very simple idea, yet a very clever one. Two very distinct gameplay styles have come together perfectly to create something that anyone can enjoy. I challenge you to play Yoku’s Island Express without a smile on your face. Go on. I bet you can’t.