Yooka Laylee Reviews
Yooka-Laylee is a fantastic game that delivers on its aspirations as Banjo-Kazooie's spiritual successor.
Even if Yooka-Laylee is inspired from Banjo-Kazooie, since ex-Rare developers joined up with Team17, for players who didn’t get to play the aforementioned game will definitely enjoy this Banjo-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.
I can’t speak for how Yooka-Laylee compares to what veteran fans would expect, but as some who loved his fair share of older generation of platformers, Yooka-Laylee is the game the genre needs.
Playtonic Games hasn't only given us a great game to play, they have started a new franchise I hope to explore for years to come.
Yooka-Laylee is a 3D platformer like those we had in the past and a great successor for Banjo-Kazooie. The gameplay is almost the same, just putting a chameleon and a bat in the place of the bear and the bird. The true Rare is now called Playtonic Games.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
A true classic platform game. It plays and feels like some Rare masterpieces such as Banjo Kazooie or Conker BFD. It seems that Nintendo Switch was designed for games like Yooka-Laylee.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Bringing back the 90s in a fresh modern twist yet maintaining its nostalgic roots.
Yooka-Laylee is a heartfelt tribute to the best of Rare on Nintendo 64. It's a challenging game, with a steep difficulty level (like old times!), always fun to play. If you're a fan of old-school platforming, you won't be disappointed.
Review in Italian | Read full review
It might not be as good as your vague memories of the hallowed games of Rare, but Yooka-Laylee has a little bit of that old lovable magic in it. It may be made for children, but there is a little something that can make the old and miserable smile again. That alone is worth it.
Yooka-Laylee is a spiritual successor that lives up to the hype!
Yooka-Laylee is an excellent 3D platformer, featuring open levels that reward skill and exploration, tight gameplay mechanics and a killer soundtrack. A few technical issues prevent it from reaching the heights achieved by classics such as Banjo-Kazooie, but gamers looking for a collect-a-thon in 2017 should definitely consider picking up Playtonic Games’ debut title.
Yooka-Laylee comes as nostalgia covered with an outstanding design. It's colorful and flawless design execution conveys us that the good old-school will never die, but rise again stronger. Leaving aside its "little black stains in the white shirt", the experience is so entertaining that we can surely invest the necessary inner peace needed to conquer and master its camera system. This is a platform games that hit us right in the feels: in the best years of our younger gaming days. Yooka-Laylee draw many smiles filled with joy on our faces, it made us remember times that today return in with all the excellence and passion they deserve.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Yooka-Laylee’s camera wants to constantly reset itself behind the characters when moving and this drove me nuts early on
While it doesn't quite stand as tall as the Mario Odyssey masterpiece, Yooka-Laylee is a game every Switch owner should consider. Fantastic fun for all ages, and tons of content to boot. [William Murphy separately reviewed the Switch (8.5) and PC (8) versions. Their scores have been averaged.]
For more better than worse, Yooka-Laylee is practically a new game in the Banjo-Kazooie series. The camera is a problem that seems to come directly from its ancestors and its combat can become tedious, but these factors end up being secondary to puzzles, characters, dialogues, exploration and the platforming gameplay. In these points, the game manages to keep alive the spirit of the adventures of the old Rare but also adapts to introduce the "collecathon" style for a new generation. It lacks a touch of more modern design in some moments, but I had a lot of fun in the 26 hours it took me to finish (and I still have some collectibles and secrets to find) and I feel that in the end, the negative and positive points of Yooka-Laylee represent exactly the game Playtonic promised with its Kickstarter.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Minor annoyances aside, Yooka-Laylee is a solid 3D buddy platformer that's full of variety, humour, and a fantastic cast of characters all wrapped in a laidback adventure.
Full of fun exploration, exciting encounters, and tons of collectibles, Yooka-Laylee is a modern take on a classic genre
By not holding up Banjo-Kazooie as the last bastion of platformers, Playtonic was able to turn Yooka-Laylee into an overall improvement on the formula it so closely mimics. We’re coming up on a relatively dry patch of 2017, and, if I’m counting on Yooka-Laylee to be my own personal flying lizard to carry me, I don’t think I could be in better hands.
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.
I imagine there will be people who won't find this kind of flavor appealing, who might consider the game to be dated and maybe even outright pandering, but I'm not one of them.