Yooka-Laylee Reviews
Check out Yooka-Laylee Review Scores from trusted Critics below. With 23 reviews on CriticDB, Yooka-Laylee has a score of:
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.
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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.
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Yooka-Laylee is gorgeous. It is a delight to behold. But its design and mechanics don't always match up to its ambitions.
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Yooka-Laylee is a fun platformer, despite some technical issues and outdated mechanics.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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There hasn't been a game quite like this since the N64, but has this experience graduated from the old-school?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Evoking the essence of late-'90s platforming without significantly modernising it, Yooka-Laylee is a game with noble aspirations, grounded by clumsily flawed execution.
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A spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie that inherits both its successes and its flaws.
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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.
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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...
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