Yooka-Laylee Review

Playtonic is widely known for being a great, successful developer, and with Yooka-Laylee, they tried something interesting. This is a platform game that tries to bring back our fond memories about the Nintendo 64 era, when platformers were amazing. However, it also comes with a twist, since it introduces some great 3D elements.

The main focus in Yooka-Laylee is to explore the world and collect all kinds of items. There is an overarching story, but that’s something you can easily skip, since you won’t be interested in it that much. In this game we have the titular duo, Yooka the iguana and then Laylee the bat that understand the book they had as furniture can actually be used to rewrite the entire fabric of the universe.

That being said, there’s an evil heel named Capital B which takes the book away, so they need to find all the pages from that book that were scattered all over the game world. It’s not easy, but the entire journey is a whole lot of fun.

Yooka-Laylee comes with 5 main worlds in total, and they all have a vibrant theme as well as plenty of cool and fun activities for you to try out. As we mentioned earlier, it’s extremely important to try and collect as many pages as possible, but doing that can be tricky. If you find the pages in that specific world, you can expand it and you will get new activities that will actually make it easier to collect new pages. So it’s a very engaging and fun experience everyone will enjoy.

When it comes to gameplay, Yooka-Laylee does not disappoint. There’s a lot of platforming and plenty of challenges, even the secrets are cool because you get to search everywhere in order to find them properly. What I like in Yooka-Laylee is that you can search in any way you like. Here you are limited to the moves of these characters, you are not forced to fight a boss to find pages. It’s more of an open world platformer, which is great. That also ends up being a problem for some, since they lack a sense of direction and specific requirements.

However, there are some downsides too. The combat in Yooka-Laylee is not the best, it can become a chore, and since the camera is 3D, there are some kinks and issues to deal with. With that being said, you do get the hang of it and the game becomes better. It’s going to take a while to access and enjoy all the content, but overall it’s totally something to try out and immerse yourself into, especially if you love platforming and this type of games in general.

Is it a game you should play? Yooka-Laylee does make a few mistakes when it comes to the overall gameplay and combat, but after a while you get used to its unique system. The story is geared more towards kids, however the title itself is engaging and also pretty impressive for what it is. Give it a try for yourself and you will have a lot of fun!