Banjo-Timewarpey
Yooka-Laylee feels like a fifteen-year-old game with a very fresh coat of paint on it. I don't really mean that as a compliment.
The good news is that the core gameplay from Banjo-Kazooie and -Tooie is all here, and it's even been iterated on, slightly. The world-expansion mechanic serves as a reasonable excuse to revisit levels, and at least some of Yooka's reptilian moves are satisfyingly distinct from Banjo's repertoire.
The bad news is that games have come a long way since the year 2000, but Yooka-Laylee hasn't. While the controls, interface, and general tactile "feel" of Super Mario 64 was iterated on and refined through Sunshine, Galaxy/2, and 3D World; Yooka-Laylee has basically all the same mechanical problems as its N64-era forebears.
It has to be intentional, I mean -- I have to believe that the spastic camera, the squishy collision physics, and the (occasionally) unskippable dialog boxes, were done this way on purpose. Because there are only three explanations I can conceive of for blatantly irritating designs like this:
- They're intentional;
- Playtonic literally invented a time machine, and developed the game fifteen years ago;
- Or none of this game's designers played any video games released after the year 2000.
I can't wholly write Yooka-Laylee off, because its core loop of exploring worlds and collecting random stuff is still rewarding and fun. It's just ... everything around this core, is stale, and kind of sucks. (Except for the writing, which is humorously self-deprecating in all the right ways.)
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