Yooka-Laylee

As a mega fan of Rare platformers growing up and as a backer for this game's kickstarter I was REALLY hoping this could change the growing negative perception of crowd funded nostalgia trips. While Yooka Laylee isn't a total bomb it definitely falls way short of expectations. In my opinion I think this game's strongest attributes are it's narrative and presentation, but it drops the ball in many key areas of it's design. I'll admit that I was rolling my eyes at how contrived the plot was rolled out, Capital B and his side kick Dr. Quack devise a plan to steal all of the world's books so they can... monopolies book sales??? They steal Laylee's "special" book that held together magical golden "pagies" scattering them across the world which you must now reclaim. There's little explanation as to what power these pagies hold and how Capitol B will even use them. Pretty lame stuff honestly, and when I saw how desperately they tried modelling Yooka and Laylee's personalities after Banjo and Kazooie I wasn't very impressed. But the game slowly started to win me over with it's dry British humour, wacky characters, and self referential punch lines. Characters like the shady salesmen Trouser and the 16-bit dinosaur sprite Rextro had me charmed and I found myself laughing quite a bit when I was able to get past the sea of immature puns and predictable gags.

The visuals are also sharp with a great colour pallet and vibrant environments (with a few exceptions). Playtonics really tries to recapture the feel of Rare's old games so they hurl eyeballs onto just about any object that is a "thing", and the voice acting is essentially just arrrgs and silly sound effects which... I won't lie; I grew up with that shit so it's much more tolerable I guess, but it is pretty ugly sounding I can't front. The soundtrack is actually quite stellar with big names like Steve Burke, Grant Kirkhope, and even David Wise composing, all of which have worked with Rare studios previously for titles like Banjo and Donkey Kong Country. The worlds in Yooka Laylee are much more expansive than in Banjo Kazooie, I'd say they're more along the scope of Donkey Kong 64's level sizes, and what's interesting is that you can expand each level once you've collected enough pagies to reveal more puzzles and tasks, there's even a decent hub world that is interconnected and ripe with it's own challenges. Just like in Banjo; you have special moves that must be learnt from Trouser, these will include things like a barrel roll or a sonic blast, or being able to shoot fire/ice balls by consuming special coloured flowers. Unlocking more moves is critical to progressing and you'll want to revisit older areas with new moves to accomplish tasks you couldn't previously handle.

See? There are a lot of great ideas at play here but ultimately the execution and level design is a ginormous mess. Individual pagie puzzles are usually really simple and isolated tasks that involve platforming or some kind of timed event. The quality of the platforming design varies from location to location but it's generally mediocre, even then it's usually the other types of non-traditional challenges that cause most of the problems here. There's awful mini-golf challenges that have you fighting to push an uncontrollable golf ball into a small hole in an unreasonable amount of time. There is a "mine-cart" challenge in each level which is supposed to be a call back to Donkey Kong Country but the cart is impossible to properly control and the courses seem as though they were designed by sadistic baboons. Rextro shows up in each level to offer you an arcade mini-game challenge but every arcade game is ASS! Every level lets you transform into a wacky object like a boat or a plant, but the controls are ASS for all of these transformations and the puzzles involving them usually suck donkey balls. The boss fights... Good lord the boss fights, every single one of them is a complete disaster either because of awful design and/or a terrible fixed camera angle. The final boss fight in particular is waaaaay too long and over indulgent.

Can we talk about the hardest boss in this game though? It's the fucking camera!!! Shit has a mind of it's own, it stutters around while you're in motion, gets caught onto objects easily, gives you a massive blind-spot almost always and you can't use some of your abilities properly unless the camera is in a very specific position. On top of that it'll sometimes decide to opt for a fixed angle in certain locations unannounced, so if you're in midair while the camera repositions itself you're screwed. In one extreme instance; one area in the second world uses a fixed camera angle for "artistic" purposes, but then, in this exact same area you're asked to shoot targets from a distance that you can't properly aim at and you can't even see the targets you're trying to hit because of the camera angle (oh, and of course there's a time limit!). It's these types of awful design choices and inconsistencies that totally bog this experience down. I often wondered what were the developers thinking? Why? Why would you give the player a flight ability that rips the challenge out of the game's platforming? Why? Why would you fill a level with VLTs and make the player spend hours trying to time slot machines just for a small handful of pagies? Why? Why are the swimming controls so awful? Why? Why would anybody want to be continuously quizzed about pointless crap in order to progress through the game? Why???

Boy oh boy did this game run me through the mills. You know there's enough charm and personality here that I really wish Playtonic Games pick this up and try again someday, but they have a long way to go if they're gonna catch up to where 3D platformers should be in 2017. *Sigh* Least I got a good soundtrack out of this!