What's Actually Wrong with Yooka-Laylee (Spoilers)

Yooka-Laylee was branded as a revival of the 3D platformer like we saw during the Nintendo 64 era. And to be honest, that's what we got. I'll admit to having nostalgia for Banjo-Kazooie, but I feel like there's at least more fun to be had from Banjo-Kazooie than Yooka-Laylee.

To start, Banjo-Kazooie had a limitation that Yooka-Laylee didn't have, or at least it wasn't as strict. Banjo-Kazooie had fairly small levels that were very dense. The made navigation easy in Banjo Kazooie and collecting everything wasn't a massive chore where searching everywhere didn't mean taking half an hour. Yooka-Laylee has large worlds that get even bigger if you choose to upgrade them.

Levels in Banjo-Kazooie also had far more room for the camera to move, and the camera used the space intelligently for the most part. Yooka-Laylee feels way more full of small rooms and tight hallways, and the camera tends to have a hard time doing anything. You aren't likely to lose a life, or even take any damage from these issues, but they will annoy you.

Throughout the game Yooka and Laylee will get new abilities. If you decide to play the PC version of this game with a keyboard rather than a controller then more power to you. Literally. You can bind every new ability to a keyboard key, but the far more popular choice will be the controller, which is a nightmare. Every new ability makes the controls that much harder to remember, to the point where by the end of the game it feels like your hands are playing Dance Dance Revolution without being able to see where to step.

The characters in this game are annoying. This isn't a case of being nostalgia-blind because I have the same issue with Banjo-Kazooie. Characters will attempt to be humorous but fail miserably, and take a long time doing it. They also have an annoying tendency to be very vague about how to complete a mission, and in some cases if you even did complete a mission. For some reason Shovel Knight is in this game. They try to justify it in-game but it's pretty blatantly just because Shovel Knight and Yooka-Laylee are both indie games that were crowdfunded. Then there's Rextro. We'll get back to Rextro.

Back on the topic of new abilities, most of them are terrible. You can turn invisible which is used more as a key to new areas, you can shoot weird rings to make invisible platforms tangible and stun enemies if you're actually having a hard time fighting an enemy, and you can completely break many of the puzzles by flying freely at will. Sure flying is a late game ability, but you can skip a lot of the game just by rushing toward the end of the game, getting the ability to fly, and going back to "solve" the puzzles. And every ability uses stamina, including rolling which is required to make Yooka and Laylee move at a reasonable pace.

The minigames in Yooka-Laylee are among the worst parts of any game I've ever played. For starters you have the minecart minigame which has an annoying amount of lag and awful controls. Then you have Rextro, who's designed to to be annoying and obsessed with old games. He runs an arcade where you can play minigames that aren't even remotely enjoyable (at least not when you decide you want to play a 3D platformer) and have horrible collision detection.

And as my final complaint, the music. I love the music of Grant Kirkhope and David Wise, but Yooka-Laylee isn't their best work. You'll get the occasional good song, but most their songs sound very different from their usual style. And I'm not saying they can't make different sounding music, but you don't advertise a Kenny G concert where he only does Queen songs.

I don't hate Yooka-Laylee, believe it or not. It's a flawed game, but not irredeemable. I hope Playtonic Games will look to the future and make more interesting games. They certainly have the money for it.