Yooka-Laylee Reviews
Check out Yooka-Laylee Review Scores from trusted Critics below. With 30 reviews on CriticDB, Yooka-Laylee has a score of:
Nostalgia will hit hard within the first few hours, but once this fades, you’ll realise that Yooka-Laylee is never able to live up to the brilliance that was Banjo-Kazooie. You’ll get some enjoyment from the open-world platforming aspects of the game, but the unlikable characters, coupled with a clunky camera among other redundant game mechanics will more than likely ruin the experience for you. I don’t doubt that even the biggest of Banjo-Kazooie fans will be left wondering what could have been.
Read Full Review
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.
Read Full Review
I am well aware that Yooka-Laylee is supposed to serve as nostalgic fan service, but it doesn’t feel like it’s done in the right way. With its horrendous camera, incredibly annoying sound design and clunky controls, the game feels more like an exploitation of its market rather than the celebration of a golden era of cute 3D platformers that it’s supposed to be.
Read Full Review
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.
Read Full Review
Overall, Yooka-Laylee is a game with a ton of retro-inspired heart, but a definite lack of polish may disappoint fans who expected the quality of their previous Banjo-Kazooie titles. With a smaller team, smaller development time, and a lower price in the end at $40, it’s still a good deal for those looking for a modern 3D platformer.
Read Full Review
Yooka-Laylee is gorgeous. It is a delight to behold. But its design and mechanics don't always match up to its ambitions.
Read Full Review
Even if Yooka-Laylee is inspired from Banjoo-Kazooie, since ex-Rare developers joined up with Team17, for players who didn’t get to play the aforementioned game will definitely enjoy this Banjoo-successor. The worlds you get to explore, the characters you meet, and how visually spectacular the game is, Yooka-Laylee is a platformer that you don’t want to miss.
Read Full Review
Yooka-Laylee is a fun platformer, despite some technical issues and outdated mechanics. If platforming wasn’t your thing in the ‘90s, there’s little here to change your mind now, but fans of the genre – and the Kickstarter backers that brought it back to life – can rest assured that they’re getting exactly what they wanted.
Read Full Review
Yooka-Laylee is built on a foundation of tried-and-tested gameplay, and it's packed with content, considering it's priced at $40 rather than $60. Anyone that's eager to revisit the 3D platformer genre will be well served by this game. However, those that don't enjoy a sense of nostalgia for jump-and-runs of days gone by might not find much to enjoy among its rough edges and throwback atmosphere.
Read Full Review
What do you get when a bat and a chameleon team up for a colourful adventure? One heck of a good time. So, let's head over to Shipwreck Creek and get ready for a modern take on classic 3D platformers.
Read Full Review
Banjo Threeie is probably never going to happen, but after playing Yooka-Laylee I’m fine with that for the first time in 17 years. Playtonic’s first foray is rough around the edges, but the center is so full of heart that it’ll melt away the more you play it. How much of that roughness you can put up with entirely depends on your history and mental fortitude for mascot platformers. For some of you that threshold is pretty low, but for me, it’s as high as Laylee can fly.
Read Full Review
It perfectly fulfils its brief of being a new Banjo-Kazooie game in all but name, but Yooka-Laylee’s reliance on nostalgia may struggle to find new fans.
Read Full Review
Of all the potential hurdles to snag on in creating a 3D platformers in the style of the late nineties classics, Playtonic deftly avoids the most egregious ones by far. At its very core, Yooka-Laylee succeeds in reviving a format long forgotten and does so with such vigor and passion. However, players shouldn’t expect it to reinvent the genre.
Read Full Review
When the suits that run major game publishers decide not to continue beloved franchises, what are ardent creators supposed to do? Quit and make a Kickstarter campaign, of course.
Read Full Review
Nothing in the games industry is sacred. Favorite games come packaged with DLC and season passes, franchises waver over time and developers lose their unique appeal. But that being said, there is something revered about the games we played as children, more specifically, the games children played in the 90s. Rare was a developer at the forefront of that hallowed time, defining a genre with the groundbreaking Banjo-Kazooie.
Read Full Review
The video game industry was dominated by wisecracking mascot platformers for decades. Over time, that scene dried up, with few successful franchises remaining outside of Nintendo's established stable. Yooka-Laylee is a callback to the heyday of the 3D platformer, but through modernization, polish, and a whole lot of creativity, it successfully demonstrates that the genre is far from dead.
Read Full Review
The problem with making a game that’s inspired heavily by the golden age of 3D puzzle platformers is that those games were inherently a bit shoddy: they were plagued with camera issues, they were riddled with bugs, they were fun but - let’s be honest - often a bit clumsy. Yooka-Laylee has taken its inspiration to heart in every way, from the cartoon cast of characters and its lo-fi art direction to the clunky, awkward controls and the dodgy camera.
Read Full Review
If you like 3D platformers, you should expect greatness. It does that style of gameplay really well. But one of the reasons the genre sort of died down is that developers were having a hard time finding new ways to make jumping puzzles exciting. There aren’t a lot of new tricks in Yooka-Laylee, but the nostalgia will either make you love it or wonder why you loved these sorts of games at all. For me, it’s been a really fun trip down memory lane. Next, I want to see if Playtonic can push t...
Read Full Review
Yooka-Laylee is an extremely impressive platformer reminiscent of an older generation of games with the proficiency you’d expect from a modern purchase. There’s a little something for everyone in this diverse and colorful world built on solid and varied gameplay.
Read Full Review
Evoking the essence of late-'90s platforming without significantly modernising it, Yooka-Laylee is a game with noble aspirations, grounded by clumsily flawed execution.
Read Full Review
A spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie that inherits both its successes and its flaws.
Read Full Review
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.
Read Full Review
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 you’re putting yourself through it just to collect quills that become useless and Pagies that simply aren’t worth the frustration. I wanted to like Yooka-Laylee, I really did...
Read Full Review
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 to be dead, still has some life left in it.
Read Full Review
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, seemingly limitless gameplay variety at the expense of polish, and a general lack of direction at times.
Read Full Review
There hasn't been a game quite like this since the N64, but has this experience graduated from the old-school?
Read Full Review
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.
Read Full Review