James DavieAlthough it’s been eight years since Yooka-Laylee Banjo Kazooied into our lives, it’s very hard to forget. One thing players brains will instantly remember are all those diverse characters and the annoying and incessant sounds they make. Imagine day-to-day interactions if you had to sound like Dr Quack-a duck with its head encased in a jar who sounds like it’s got a brick jammed down its throat. Not a very pleasant sound to keep hearing, but Yooka-Laylee is full of these sounds! Every character has loud voices you can’t unhear, and so when you do listen to them you will remember your time spent with the game if you’ve had the “ahem” pleasure of doing so before. Now, Yooka-Laylee has been refurbished for modern consoles, and while you may think you’ll be in for more of the same, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how good it is because it is night and day better than the 2017 original for sure. However, would you want to double-dip, and should new players check it out-or should it be left in the deep past?
Pair Necessities
Best buds Yooka and Laylee are the coveted owners of “The One Book,” a purple and golden tome that contains the collective history of the world, as well as the power to rewrite reality. Unfortunately for the jolly duo, a burly bumble bee with the sinister cunning of Mr Burns known as Capital B wants The One Book for himself, and he instructs his subordinate Dr. Quack to conjure up a plan to obtain it. What this leads to is The One Book getting sucked into Hivory Towers (where Capital B resides) and all of its pages are scattered all over the land, becoming collectibles for Yooka and Laylee to collect together known as Pagies.
Yooka-Replayee‘s set-up is straightforward and doesn’t waste time with complexities, preferring to let you explore, find Pagies and meet the delightful array of characters you’ll find in all of the game’s magical and wondrous worlds. Yooka-Replayee as well as original Yooka-Laylee took inspiration from the characterful Rare N64 platforming classic Banjo-Kazooie, and the guys at Playtonic have done a great job replicating the formula… in this remake anyway. The original Yooka-Laylee suffered from janky platforming, imprecise controls, and various problems Replayee has splendidly rubbed out, making Yooka-Laylee as great as it should’ve been in the first place-it’s only taken eight years for this rejuvenation.
A Rare-Replicating Replayee
So what is new in Yooka-Replayee? When you gaze upon its luscious environments and the crispness of the lighting, you can tell the presentation has been overhauled considerably from the old 2017 original. Graphically, it looks replenished and full of vigor and vibrancy that’s impressive. Do yourself a favor and go back, take a long hard stare at those dingy Yooka-Laylee visuals. There’s no need for an eye test because what you’ll be something that’s (with all due respect) butt ugly, and it’s not nice to subject your eyes to it now considering that Replaylee has managed to turn a cobra lily into a glorious daffodil glazed in sunshine.
A new map to keep track of collectibles, as well as fast travel points have been included to give a modern accessible flavor to this retro platformer. This means no more hunting around aimlessly for Pagies and you can zip to where you want to without having to tediously navigate around the worlds to find specific locations. All you need to do is find a shy blue ticket-looking chappy hanging about in the world, and you can survey the map to find fast travel points you can access.
The pageie-collection jingle has changed too, and now it’s not as catchy as it was before despite looking more celebratory and epic. One thing you can’t criticize the original Yooka-Laylee for, is that it was excellent at throwing annoying voices and awkwardly snappy tunes at you. The problem with many modern games is that their music fails to be memorable, and yet Yooka-Laylee, and thus Yooka-Replaylee, are outstanding for creating a playlist that grabs your attention in a way that seems as aggressive as someone yanking your collar out of nowhere, so you may not like these numbers, but they’ll certainly stick in your head.
A Pagie Turner
Wandering around the diverse worlds in Yooka-Replaylee is freeform and there isn’t much in the way of instruction to tell you where to go. Exploration and discovery are central to the experience, in a way that serviceably apes Banjo-Kazooie without daring to spark a fission of creativity. Your central focus is to track down Pagies however you can, but you can also collect golden coins by breaking environmental objects and defeating enemies, and special purple quills you’ll locate in groups. Both of these secondary collectibles can be spent at two vendors, both of which offer up a bunch of new abilities and tonics that augment your skills.
Trowzer is some kind of red Safari snake who is usually busy on the phone, but he’ll allow you to exchange quills for special moves and abilities like Camo Cloak, which turns Yooka and Laylee invisible, helping them bypass security cameras, and Flappy Flight, which gives Laylee the ability to fly over taller obstacles and reach otherwise inaccessible areas. Trowzer is a very useful ally for providing these new skills, though you’ll wish he’d stop looking so busy.
Vendi is a big yellow vending machine lady who specializes in Play Tonics, cos y’know, the developer of Yooka-Replaylee is Playtonic Games… har-har. She’s a bubbly character and with her upper body size, it’s difficult to understand how she can maintain a vertical stance with such puny feet, but at least she has got the goods for Yooka and Laylee. As for her tonics, they are effectively gameplay modifiers that give our heroes additional support. For instance the Bruiser ability allows butterfly slurp consumption to grant you one extra health slither, and Salmon grants you more lung capacity whenever Yooka and Laylee take dip trips underwater. Like Trowzer’s skills, Vendi’s are also very well placed, and they offer you extended freedom to keep on adventuring with energetic fervor.
Worlds Of Wonder
Yooka-Replaylee dishes out an abundance of platforming, racing and retro gaming-based challenges await you like a carnival of games with various hosts who’ll give away Pagies as prizes for overcoming their particular missions and carrying our their favors. There is a racing competition where you square off against helmeted ghost clouds, a challenge to collect as many diamonds as possible while riding a minecart on a rail akin to Donkey Kong Country, and a request by a pig to track down investigating scouts searching for treasure. You’ll want to find Rextro as well, who is an excitable dinosaur who stars in his own arcade games, and you can play those to unlock medals and earn Pagies. Out of all the characters you meet, Rextro is the most delightful because his missions place emphasis on arcadey fun, rather than the usual and sometimes tiresome search for Pagies out in the open-worlds.
A smattering of bosses will make your acquaintance, and they’re not particularly taxing or charismatic, but they’re a fun bunch to smack around. The first boss for example is essentially an angry mounted door with teeth you need to punch out like the world’s most pleasantly aggressive dentist. He’ll hurl rolling logs at you as you try to break his teeth, but save for his flame-spewing attacks, he’s a cakewalk. The I.N.E.P.T boss sits you in a mine cart the whole way through, and Planette gives you a miniature sailboat to overcome this massive rock’s rippling and concussive projectile attacks, so Replaylee does offer some pleasing gameplay variety with its amalgamation of boss encounters.
A Load Of Pagie-antry
Sometimes you’ll encounter a colored coin that multiplies into a trail whereby you’ll need to chase down and collect all the coins in order to unlock the reward at the end, and other times you’ll need to perform basic tasks to unlock Pagies, such as lighting lanterns with a fire-breathing tonic ball you’ll find nearby, and accessing hidden areas containing Pagies like trap-laden underwater layers or in secret hideouts. Pagies can be found in many different places and they can be squeezed inside chests you’ll need to open.
While collecting Pagies is fun and addictive, they’re too often the crux of the experience. If you didn’t like the way Astro Bot forces you to collect bots, then you definitely won’t like Yooka-Replaylee forcing you to collect Pagies to makes progress. Having said this, Pagies sound mischievous and it’s satisfying to nab a particularly difficult-to-reach Pagie, so their charms and the effort it takes to grab them are worthwhile, but ultimately you do need them to unlock new worlds and their purpose is one-dimensional. Sometimes you’ll encounter torn up Pagie pieces that’ll require you to hunt for the missing parts and reassemble them to unlock a single Pagie, but the complexities of physically snatching them up ends there.
A Nostalgia Trip
Nostalgia is the fuel that burns constantly through Yooka-Replayee in the same way it did with the original. There are many examples of games that aim to pay homage to their forbears, but they usually include twists and clever complements to the works they take inspiration from. Yooka-Laylee always appeared to prioritize Rare’s platforming classics over its own identity, and as such it can feel like a parody or a pastiche rather than a game with a unique voice.
If you didn’t like Yooka-Laylee, you might diminish Replaylee as merely polishing a turd, but that’s not a fair assessment to make. It’s a true effort to correct a game that was divisive upon its initial release, and the result is a platformer that is sparkly and has been polished well. Yeah it’s still a nostalgia trip riding on the coattails of Rare’s finest, but Yooka-Laylee was always meant to be a tribute rather than an innovator in the genre. Replaylee is definitely the best way to play this game and you should definitely check it out, but you better love Rare platforming classics and gratuitously incessant character voices.