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2017 is gearing up to be the year of a 3d platformer revival.
We have Mario Odyssey slated for a holiday release, fingers crossed A Hat in Time will
finally make its debut, and of course the first one to show up and bring nostalgia back
from an almost 20 year absence is Yooka-Laylee.
With the same dev team that made Banjo Kazooie coming back for another round, I had high
hopes for this game - it seemed like all the right jiggies were in place for another masterpiece.
But did it deliver?
Well, to get a fuller picture, we need to take a look at what made Banjo so endearing
back in 1998.
Let’s talk about it.
If I could sum up all the greatness of Banjo-Kazooie into one word it would be CHARM.
The bear and bird were polar opposites of each other - Banjo being the happy go lucky
protagonist, while Kazooie was snarky, pessimistic, and full of rude quips.
Gruntilda was such an unforgettable villain as she always spoke in rhyme and reminded
you of her looming presence every step of the way.
But even the minor characters all had distinct personalities shown prominently by their unique
speech patterns, from a burping hippo captain to a (kind of?) racist snake charmer?
The levels themselves were expansive yet simple at the same time.
While there were a lot of diverse areas to explore, everything was placed for a specific
reason.
Distinctive landmarks made navigation and memorizing the level layouts very simple - it
sort of felt like a theme park, where you could get on all the different rides that each
location had to offer, like climbing the giant snowman in Freezeezy Peak or clearing Jinxy’s
nostrils in Gobi’s Valley.
And the crazy thing is, they KNEW that all of these locals and characters were memorable
because they test you on them at the end of the game in Grunty’s Furnace Fun, more on
that later.
But what has always stuck out to me most about Banjo is the secrets.
If you collect all the notes and jiggies it unlocks double health to give you extra help
in the final boss fight.
And the way it handled cheat codes was particularly clever.
If you found the secluded spellbook Cheato, he would give you a code to double your feather
and egg storage, but you entered them on the sandcastle floor of Treasure Trove Cove that
was used for another jiggy earlier on - reusing assets for multiple purposes, SMART.
But of course the cherry on the mystery cake was the secret eggs and ice key used for
Stop ‘n’ Swop.
Long story short, these were extremely hidden collectibles that would unlock special abilities
and rewards in the sequel, Banjo Tooie, if you had save data for both games.
It was so ahead of its time that it wasn’t even possible on the N64, but now on Xbox
Live this vision is fully realized.
Rareware had big plans for these games even from their inception and the way it teased
you with something you just couldn’t reach was so genius – it planted natural craving
and curiosity in your brain, and delivered in an out of the box way no one else was doing
at the time.
Speaking of Banjo Tooie, while it stumbles in a lot of ways as a 2nd installment, a lot
of cool aspects are in place here – particularly how the different worlds are all connected
and you can travel between them through shortcuts or train stations.
I had no idea that when I retrieved stolen treasure from a sleeping caveman I was actually
leaving the first world and entering the 5th.
And then when I came back to the same area through Terrydactyland I was like, “OH NO
WAY!”
Interconnectivity is the name of the game - in Banjo-Kazooie you could complete every
stage in one go except for one instance where you need a powerup from a different level,
but in Tooie, jiggies are interwoven all over the place and many different abilities from
various worlds are needed to collect them.
This was the kind of stuff I was so excited for in Yooka-Laylee.
After such a long hiatus, I could only expect that the ex-guys from Rare had more crazy
ideas to put into practice with their first IP as Playtonic Games.
And without a doubt, a lot of the appeal that made Banjo great has made its way into Yooka.
The humor is still on point, the characters are silly and unique.
I stand by saying that Capital B is one of the most creative ideas for a villain in the
history of video games – it’s a triple entendre!
(You see, cuz he is a bee, He’s a business man so he wants capital, and he’s Capital
B like the big bad boss.)
On top of that you have hilarious ideas like a literal trouser snake and an old school
dinosaur named Rextro.
It’s just perfect.
Not to mention the cameos from other indie games, and the heart strings of nostalgia
being pulled straight out of your chest and thrown on the floor.
But while the basic premise is virtually the same – quirky animal duo collects items
to unlock worlds and go on a wild adventure, some things are improved for a nice touch.
Like the ghost writers, which are Yooka’s version of Jinjos – you don’t just collect
them in this game, you have to complete some sort of task for them to be accessible, like
using your sonar sense to cause invisible spirits to appear, feeding hungry ones some
food, or even fighting them!
Probably the best thing that Yooka-Laylee does is the “expanding the world system”.
If you collect enough pagies, you can either unlock new areas, or enlarge old ones.
So if you’re enjoying one level a lot, you can just grow it to experience more instead
of moving on.
The stage that does this best is Tribalstack Tropics, it’s pretty big to begin with,
but when you expand it, it becomes gigantic, with so much more to do.
However, as you progress further, it costs more pagies to broaden worlds, so they need
to have more pagies hidden behind these expansions to make them worth it.
So by the time you reach the 5th world, if you don’t alter it, there’s only like
3 islands and just a couple pagies you can collect.
Also, there’s only 5 levels in the whole game by the way.
They’re big, but I would have rather seen 10 smaller worlds, but hey to each their own.
To get the best experience with the expansion system, I recommend spending an hour or so
in the smaller versions of the level first to get the hang of everything and become familiar
with major landmarks.
This way you appreciate the changes that happen, rather than seeing a giant world from the
start that might seem overwhelming at first.
At least I think this was how they intended it to be done anyway.
Unfortunately, this is about where the good qualities end.
The negatives of Yooka-Laylee highly outway the positives, and its biggest crime of all
is a lack of polish, which is very apparent within the first few hours of playing the
game.
There are a bunch of little problems that could have easily been fixed with a few simple
changes or a little more time in development to work out the kinks.
Like how the camera faces Yooka and Laylee when you enter a room, instead of behind them
toward the open area, which can cause you to fall off cliffsides if you’re not careful.
On top of this, camera perspectives will change when you enter trigger points which can make
platforming near impossible in some spots.
It’s bizarre when it happens, it feels like a game made in 2017 should not have these
problems.
Some cutscenes and textboxes aren’t skippable, but others are, which is really confusing.
It would be one thing if you couldn’t speed them up at all, but because you can part of
the time, it becomes really jarring when you reach some dialogue that can’t be skipped,
it’s inconsistent and annoying because the base speed of the text is really slow.
But to be fair, they have recently patched this in an update - showing that indeed it
was a simple little adjustment that probably should have been included from the get go.
I’m surprised no one is really talking about this, but there’s only 6 types of enemies
in the entire game – basic henchmen, big strong spiky dudes, robot sentries, underwater
jellyfish, military bees and eyeballs that attach to nearby objects.
That’s it – which is very underwhelming when compared to the Banjo games where each
area has unique and varied foes related to the level’s theme.
The main corplets do change aesthetically in each stage, but their mechanics are exactly
the same.
Combat in general feels like an afterthought in this game, and baddies are haphazardly placed without
much forethought.
There aren’t any checkpoints or warp pads in Yooka-Laylee, so when you die, you respawn
at the last doorway you walked through, which could easily be on the other side of the map
and you have to make the slow trek back to where you were.
One time, I fell off a really high platform all the way down to the ground, and the only
way to get back up there is to start the arduous climb once again.
In fact, I wish that I had just died instead because it would have respawned me closer
to where I fell.
This is frustrating and time-wasting to say the least, especially when its predecessor
in the year 2000 had a better system.
Quills are Yooka-Laylee’s version of Notes, but they again seem placed at random and without
any particular direction.
In Banjo-Kazooie, the notes were either along the main path you would take to explore the
map or guiding you toward secrets or hidden collectibles, but in Yooka the quills are
sometimes just as hidden as the pagies, and don’t really guide you in any significant
way – they’re more decoration than anything.
But on top of all this, there are significant design decisions that seem to be direct downgrades
from Banjo titles.
Instead of gathering items like feathers or eggs to use your abilities, Yooka-Laylee has
an energy bar that depletes as you use it.
While you can collect upgrades to increase its size, the bar recharges very slowly, and
awkwardly, like why?
So basically, rather than having limited ammunition that you can stock up on, your new resource
is time.
And when you run out, you just have to wait.
And we all know how fun that is.
Let’s talk about Dr. Quack’s Quiz Time, Yooka’s incorporation of a trivia minigame.
Grunty’s Furnace Fun was a hilarious surprise the first time you see it because in place
of a final boss battle you’re greeted with an over the top, ridiculously wacky game show.
It’s the final exam before the ending, testing you on all the different things you’ve experienced,
and you get to choose what types of questions you’re asked based on the tiles of the board.
These include deciphering a specific map by only a screenshot, knowing who’s voice matches
which character, or even questions about Grunty’s personal life that you find out by speaking
to her sister Brentilda.
You can try your luck at joker spaces to get skips if you don’t want to do a particular
tile, and you have to watch out for death squares that launch you into the lava pit
below if you get the answer wrong.
Now, here’s Yooka-Laylee’s quiz show.
On top of trying to bank on nostalgia, it is just inferior in every way.
One straight line, 10 random questions, 3 strikes you’re dead.
Even worse, this happens 3 times throughout the game instead of once at the end – the
first of which occurs after visiting just one world.
So rather than testing your vast knowledge of all the crazy things you’ve experienced,
it asks you questions like “how many quills have you collected so far”, you know, something
every player would know off the top of their head.
It becomes a terrible nuisance really quickly, so instead of saying “oh boy, this might
be a challenge” you say “oh come on, not this again!”
It’s frankly ridiculous that this is in the final game in this state.
Even the transformations felt uninspired.
In each world, these different forms you turn into are used for 1 or 2 pagies at best, and
that’s about it.
In Banjo, it felt like they were much more vital to your quest, letting you reach new
areas you couldn’t as the bear and bird or pushing you to think outside the box.
Like in Mad Monster Mansion, I was stumped for weeks on how to get this jiggy that was
JUUST out of my reach, but it blew my mind when I figured out you could go on the rooftop
via the maze, opening up a whole new world of possibilities as the pumpkin.
You could even take these transformations outside of the levels to find hidden secrets
in Grunty’s Lair like the aforementioned Cheato books, or raising the water level to
progress in the game.
Not to mention that they were super cute too!
In Yooka, you get this snow plow that’s terrible to control but they expect you to
do precise platforming with.
So there’s that.
Nah, some of them I did enjoy like the school of piranha fish that can fit in tight spaces
or the pirate ship equipped with different types of cannons to blow up rocks, but overall
they felt constricted, shoehorned and like a missed opportunity.
Some of the abilities were really confusing too.
There’s one called Sonar ‘Splosion and I thought the description was cheekily telling
me it breaks glass, so when I saw a cracked window I tried it out, but to no avail.
Twice I found what seemed to be an obvious connection to this ability, but nope, turns
out there’s another move called Reptile Rush that is specifically used to break through
glass panes.
Instead, Sonar ‘Splosion is used to pop balloons or destroy crowds of enemies.
I guess they really weren’t kidding when they said “don’t use near glass”...but
why mention it at all then?
The moves are fitting in relation to what a chameleon and bat would have, but I think
they could have done better at explaining what they do in practice, like how turning
invisible also redirects a laser beam if you stand under it, or how Yooka’s tongue can
extend to ridiculous lengths if he’s reaching for a Lizard Lash contraption even though
his tongue is only this long normally.
Wait does Yooka have TWO TONGUES???
Rextro and Cartos crack me up because they’re whole shtick is that they’re outdated gaming
conventions that nobody wants to play anymore, so they poke fun at modern tropes like pay
to win systems or microtransactions, but then their actually gameplay is just as bad as
it has been in the past.
Rextro’s arcade games are glitchy, drawn out Mario Party minigame rejects that are
not fun in the slightest.
And Cartos complains about how minecart challenges aren’t popular anymore, but his levels are
annoying and cumbersome to control – I have to assume that this is the joke, otherwise
it’s a downright travesty.
But ironically, what has disappointed me most about Yooka-Laylee is what it SHOULD have
done the best - its incorporation of secrets, or lack thereof I should say.
There’s a ton of instances where I think something special might be hidden, but then
it turned out to be underwhelming - especially in the overworld of Hivory Towers.
For example, I found this library book puzzle where I thought it might be some sort of code
system to input cheats, but no it was a simple little brainteaser to unlock a pagie.
There’s this giant menacing machine that sucks up all the pages of the world and it
has extensive security and a giant button at the entrance.
Oh man, this must be a crazy secret, maybe it unlocks when you collect all the pagies
in the game - nope you just have to knock over these huge books to press the button
and you get a pagie.
You know how I said everything in Banjo was there for a purpose?
Yooka has all sorts of areas that seem to be important, but end up being meaningless
- simple fluff to make the world seem bigger like this giant pit of acid, seriously no
idea why this is here.
It’s not on your totals screen, but there is one extremely hidden type of collectible
in every world called pirate treasure, and there seems to be a cloud of mystery around
it when you find them - what could they be used for?
Guess what - it does nothing.
It literally just unlocks achievements.
Good job for finding them, you!
But worst of all, is that Playtonic tried to build suspense with secrets ever since
the toybox demo they released to early backers.
If you collect all the quills in the toybox, it unlocks a hidden room, and when you find
it, this robot tells you about a secret clue in the real game that you can reveal by ground
pounding on a specific island next to a pirate ship.
When I found this before the game released, I was so excited to discover what this could
possibly be!
So I scoured the game trying to track down the island, and when I finally did in the
last world, sure enough, a little robot comes out of the sky to give you your reward!
When you talk to him, he says “loading exposition 50.1%, please be patient” and that’s...it.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Now, I can only assume this means that these hidden clues will play a role in their next
game, and triggering the dialogue here will unlock something new in their next adventure,
but it doesn’t explain any of that and in the moment, it was such a huge letdown to
have all this build up of a big reveal, only to find this in its place.
I can’t begin to describe my disappointment with the lack of secret stuff in Yooka, especially
knowing the minds behind the game - this should have been the one area that they excelled at!
But instead, it feels about as bare bones as it gets.
And that’s probably the greatest problem with Yooka-Laylee.
Like I said, it’s biggest disservice is lacking polish - it feels like a tech demo
- playable but unfinished.
So many of Yooka’s problems could have been fixed if they simply gave it another 6 months
to a year in development to work out all the problems and add more meat to sink our teeth
into.
People are calling Yooka-Laylee the spiritual successor to Rare’s golden franchise - the
Banjo Threeie we’ve been waiting for, but in this current state, it’s more like Banjo
Kazooie .5...HD.
All that being said, I still enjoyed the game!
It was a fun little experience for what it was, and they rely on the nostalgia pretty
hard, so if you’re a fan of Rare’s previous platformers, I’m sure you’ll find charm
here as well.
But I know that the developers’ potential is much greater than this.
It feels like they wanted to rush this game out to meet a deadline, and the gameplay suffered
extensively for it.
Now I can only hope that Yooka-Laylee was a warm up, and a sequel or new title by Playtonic
will have some real thought put into it.
Until then, we have games like A Hat in Time just around the corner.
While it doesn’t have a release date yet, they have promised that it will be in 2017,
and this game has been in development for almost 5 years, most of which has been putting
finishing touches and adding polish to the final product.
The beauty of the 3D Platformers of yesteryear came from all the little details and things
below the surface.
You can make a game that has all the right elements, but without the care and charisma
it won’t be remembered.
So here’s to looking to the future.
No doubt the audience has a desire for this type of game, and there are many more on the
way.
Even titles like Snake Pass, while more a puzzler, still embody that level of nostalgia
and magic while also trying something totally new from a gameplay perspective, so I hope
to see even more innovation and new things in the genre in games to come.
Tell me your thoughts on Yooka-Laylee, obviously I’ve talked long enough about it, do you
think it was up to snuff?
Or are there areas you wish it had improved as well?
Tell me in the comments below, and let’s talk about it.
All of this critique comes out of a place of love for this genre, and I can’t wait
to see what happens next.
So thanks for watching, I’ll see you guys next time, and stay frosty my friends!
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Thanks guys, I'll see you later.