Yooka-Laylee

Yooka-Laylee breathes new life into the collectathon platformer genre, but those who weren't into it in its heyday may see less mileage here.

Serving as an homage to the past, Yooka-Laylee is strongly inspired by elements of the team’s previous efforts, and despite some flaws, it is the game that fans have been waiting for all these years.

Yooka-Laylee is a fun game, but its controls, plot and somewhat plentiful bugs hamper the experience. 3D platformer veterans will find something to like here, but others might be turned off.

Yooka-Laylee contains all the pieces needed for a fun, enjoyable throwback to the 3D collectathons of the 64-bit era. The characters are charming and funny, your set of abilities is vast and entertaining, and four out of five of the worlds are fun playgrounds to explore. While it lacks the heart and polish of some of its incredible predecessors, it’s a good reminder that this genre, once thought t...

A spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie that inherits both its successes and its flaws.

Evoking the essence of late-'90s platforming without significantly modernising it, Yooka-Laylee is a game with noble aspirations, grounded by clumsily flawed execution.

Missing notes.

Yooka-Laylee then, is somewhat of a letdown. If you were expecting a solid 3D platformer true to its 90’s roots, then you may find some enjoyment in it, but you’ll have to work through a myriad of issues that you wouldn’t expect to exist in a modern game. Starting out relatively strong in the grand scheme of things, it unfortunately loses focus and charm as you progress, until you ask yourself why...

The problem with Yooka-Laylee is that pretty much every criticism levelled at the throwback platformer can be waved away with a 90s novelty foam hand: it's supposed to be that way. But where recent revivals like Shovel Knight have managed to revisit games gone by through rose-tinted glasses, Playtonic's take on the Nintendo 64 classics of yore suffers from age-old problems: a dicey camera, seeming...

This karma chameleon's problems come and go.

There hasn't been a game quite like this since the N64, but has this experience graduated from the old-school?

Yooka-Laylee would fit right into the late 90s with its vague puzzles, wakka-wakka voices, and confusing levels. Time has moved on since the N64, and while there are a handful of bright spots, this sadly isn't the catalyst for a 3D platformer revival.