Actually the genre was never as dead as people want to make you believe. There have always been 3D platformers but not quite like the famous Nintendo 64 era.
Anyway, Yooka-Laylee made quite some news the last month before its release. Not the good kind of news. If you didn't follow the drama, which is very likely, Jontron, a popular Youtuber, made quite the headline when he shared on an interview some insight on his thoughts on immigration politics. I don't go into detail with this for obvious reasons but he made pretty much clear, he is not a fan of immigrants.
Funny though that he is one or at least a descendant of one himself. Ouch!
What you also probably didn't know, he was invited as guest voice cast for Yooka-Laylee. I don't know what character he exaczly spoke but it was a side character, simply a guest role, nothing more. Now you have to understand, Yooka-Laylee does not have real voice lines but instead people just imitate sounds with their voice, something that Banjo Kazooie did ages ago.
So he never had a fully voice line to begin with, all he did was blabbling in the mic. Not really soemthing you could distinguish from different people. However, with his recent views exposed by the media, the developers of Yooka-Laylee distanced themself from him and said they remove his voice lines from the game. Which Jontron said himself he can understand. it was okay for him. Now, I'm not really a fan of him or his voice, so I couldn't care less about him being removed.
However, his thousands of fans do care about this. They pretty much started a shitstorm on Playtronic (the developers) because of this and accused them of being racist (because of Jontrons ethnic background) and demanded refunds for their kickstarter pledges. Which... kind of was the most stupid thing I heard in a while. When they pledged on Kickstarterm they signed a liability. Playtronic has no reason to refund them, especially since they didn't took anything away fromt he product, it's still the same game less some voice lines. Which were never a feature of the game anyway, they were simply a guest character.
Because the fans didn't get their money back, they flamed the developers and spammed the official forums.
Eventually some of the community managers snapped ans snarked back at the crybabys (at this point you have to call them that way) hich fueled the flames even more of course.
In the end both sides did pretty stupid stuff while the developers had to deal with a mess just because of one simple decision.
Game gets released, this wasn't of course the end of the show. Since they didn't get refunds, they still ahd the game. And because they had th egame, they had access to the review system fo Steam and created another shitstorm there, where they told people how aweful the game is and what a waste of money it is. Most stuff was simply copied from each other or from some official reviewers that didn't put a good light on the game, namely Jimquisition/Jim Sterling (seriously, this dude can go to hell anyway but that's just my opinion and has nothing to do with his review on this perticular game) who gave the game a 2/10 and said the most horrible things about it. at least in his case you cannot say he is a Jontron Fanboy. I don't think he is a fan of anything but himself anyway.
Now, let's get straight to the game itself. I bought it, I played it.I didn't care for the Steam reviews, but I dreaded it because some serious game critics rated the game poorly. I... kind of was disappointed with the result? Not with the game but that the critics didn't care at all for the game itself.
The main goal of the game was to recreate a classic 3D platformer of the old times. Stuff like Super Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie, etc. And they nailed it. Maybe they nailed it too good. I like to divide this stuff in "nostalgia" and "overstatement". Nostalgia simply is the feeling or the appeal of the old games. Yooka Laylee is exactly a 1 to 1 copy of that. It's not a reimaging, it is a copy. well, of course the levels, characters and all this stuff is new but the gameplay and the features are directly taken from Banjo-Kazooie (you have to know, Playtronic is composed of people that worked on Banjo-Kazooie in the past). Because of this, they did a good job. If you want another Banjo-Kazooie, you get one.
The other part is overstatement. This is, when they did too much of the old stuff because of the sake of "Nostalgia". Develpers, that recreate old games, want to bait players with the nostalgic feeling but sometimes they overdo it and suddenly you have not only the good but also the bad. This is the case with Yooka-Laylee. While some say they ONLY copied the bad stuff, this is not true. The game itself is excellent and tons of fun (if you like the genre). However, ignoring the mistakes made wouldn't do the game justice either. We have to be fair on both ends and the game does a lot of wrong just because they wanted to make it nostalgic.
I don't want to mention the camera because a lot of people bash on this and honestly, making the camera behave perfect on all occassions is really hard in these games because you see the game from every single angle possible. I don't have that much problems with the cmarea anyway but it seems that other people do. Maybe they simply played too much third person shooters, where you have one camera angle the entire game.
A good example of "overdoing it" are the voices. Liek I said before, BK did it, so they wanted to do it here too. But the chattering voices are most often annoying as hell, only a few voices are done right. Trowzers sounds really good, the protagonist, the characters you hear the most often in the game, sound terrible. The most annoying character voice so far is Dr Quack and he is the first one you hear in the game. He is a duck (of course) and they tried to imitate a duck with their voice but the whole thing sounds like a fat guy that ran too much and is out of his breath (it really sounds like this, this isn't exaggerating).
Minigames are another good examle. Of course this game has tons of them, after all there are 145 main onjectives to collect and these have to be filled with tasks. Most minigames are well designed but some are really really
really terrible. An example? The race against Nimble the cloud. You have to use the sprint move which drains energy, in order to regain energy, you ahve to collect butterflys. Problem is, the whole race does not leave much room for mistakes, if you even skip one butterfly, you might run out of energy and nimble will outrun you with no chance to catch up, even if you do perfectly after. I had to do the race multiple times and it was one of the FIRST tasks in the game.
Another example is the shooting gallery in world 1. This thing goes the exact opposite way than the cloud race. Instead of incredibly hard, it's too easy. Eactually, you cannot screw up at all, because there is no timer, no limited ammo, you can try to shoot at the targets as often as possible and if you aren't drunk, you will eventually hit all of them. The minigame has in my opinion no purpose but to take some time from the player. Ouch.
Spoiler alert, this is about the first boss:
The tasks are either incredibly hard or stupidly easy. there is barely something inbetween. Another example of overdoing it, they wanted hard tasks but they kind of ruined the difficulty graph here. Normally a game is easy at the start and progresses to get harder the longer it goes with some spikes inbetween to keep the player on his watch. This game is spikes all over.
Okay, anoth rambling, honestly, the game
is good. Liek, really good, I had much fun with it. And I just reached world 2 (of 5). One of the new features they did for this game is that you can "expand" worlds by using the main collectibles of the game as currency. This way old worlds add new segments to them with new stuff to doscover, new objectives etc. That way you can come back later to worlds, expand them and look for new stuff instead of seeing something and wondering how to get there.
Another thing I liked is the "berry" system. At some point Yooka learns to how to eat special berries which give him super powers depending ont he berry. This allows him to solve soem of the puzzles in the game, some berries can be shot as ammunition, some let him breath fire or spit water and I recently dscivered one that lets him throw bombs. It's an interesting feature, nothing new in the genre but it still is fun.
The graphics look very well, the worlds are detailed designed, the characters look goofy liek they should be and in general the game looks great, even on the lowest setting.
The game might not run smooth on any computer, at first it ran really awful on mine until I deactivated V-Sync and suddenly I had no lag at all. If you bought the game and it does not run well, deactivate V-Sync, this might help.
The game has with 145 main collectibles and over 1000 side collectibles a lot to do, at least for completionist. People that simply want to finish the game might run through in a very short time because the target goals aren't set very high.
As a last note, the game costs with 50$ a lot of money, something might not be worth for everyone. If you truly are a fan of BK and similiar games and a completionist, than this game is worth the money. If you just want the game for a playthrough and not for every single bit, the game costs too much. The main storyline is too short and too quickly experienced in my opinion.
