Game Review: Yooka-Laylee

Okay, I was way too harsh on this game the last time I played through it. That's the first thing I want to say as a followup to how I wasn't overly excited about how this game was going to turn our.

So, the game follows a chameleon named Yooka and his friend, a bat named Laylee, as the adventure through the corporate lair of the evil Capital B, and try to reclaim the lost pages of their magical book. It's a pretty standard collect-a-thon plot, but the game still ended up being quite fun to explore and go through overall.

While the gameplay, as you can tell from the name, is about collecting as many items as possible to progress through the game, it still was fun to me. 

I should explain my history with this game before I got further. When I was a child, I owned a Nintendo 64 and I loved two games on it above all else: Banjo Kazooie and its sequel Banjo Tooie. I always wanted to see what a modern iteration of this game would be like because the developers got bought out by my eternal enemy: Microsoft.

Anyways, so it seemed like the Banjo Kazooie game was dead after Microsoft released the hated sequel Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. Well, some of the original developers formed an indie studio called Playtonic and decided to make a spiritual successor to Banjo Kazooie and this was the result.

Now, is it perfect? Definitely not, but the better elements outweighed the bad ones. The exploration, the sarcastic, fourth wall breaking characters, the (mostly) great controls, everything felt like Banjo Kazooie reborn to me. The only issues I had was the framerate would stutter from time to time and it was SUPER noticeable, and took me out of the game.

Overall, I would recommend this game to anyone who loves classic 90s platformer collect-a-thon games and silly sarcastic humor. This game was everything it needed to be and more, even if that just ended up being a massive shot of nostalgia.

Next time, in a weird twist of fate, we will be continuing the story of Yooka and Laylee in a new sidescrolling adventure that is considered by many to be even better than the first story. Look out for Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair.

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