Maniafig's Maniacal Mansion: July 2019

Yooka Laylee is an interesting game. Wildly successful on Kickstarter, it released in 2017 and there still doesn't seem to be a consensus on whether it's a Kickstarter success like Undertale and Shovel Knight or a Kickstarter failure like Mighty No. 9 or any number of games that get completely stuck in development hell.

Banking really hard on nostalgic appeal to 3D platforming collectathons of the days of the N64 and Playstation, the game released to little modern competition but plenty of old games to compare and contrast it with, especially the Banjo Kazooie series which it takes very clear inspiration from wholesale.

Zooks! It's Yooksa Laylee!!

I never played Banjo Kazooie or backed the Kickstarter. I only got the game in 2019 when it was on sale. I'm quite late to the party! The game came on my radar early in its development, I liked an early trailer and was impressed with its Kickstarter performance, but when it came out the reception was all over the place, varying from it being a worthy successor bringing a dead genre to the modern age to a lifeless imitation that fixed none of the problems that held the genre back.

So, why did I get it anyway? Well, it was cheap, and I was just interested in finding out whether it's bad or good.

And overall? It's kinda bad. But also good! I liked it a lot!! There was an omnipresent feeling of jank around every corner, much of the visual design leaves much to be desired and some specific sections of the game just don't control well. Yet I still felt genuine joy at exploring each stage, collecting all collectibles and listening to the music. I groaned at some dialogue, I laughed at some dialogue. I got angry at a few segments, I felt very satisfied with a few segments.

Nothing is quite as satisfying as that tongue.

Being a collectathon, most of the gameplay consists of exploring the game's 5 main world and the hub world. The overall quality of the levels does vary, I found myself liking the first and fifth world the most, those being Tribalstack Tropics and Galleon Galaxy, the first felt like the most polished and refined world overall, no doubt to make the game have a good first impression. I especially liked the water moat and ice rink races, those felt really satisfying to beat! Scaling up the several landmarks that reach for the skies also gave a good sense of progression. It also meant some nice views! Being the first level, there are also a lot of times where you just cannot do certain quests yet due to lacking the required powers, which can be annoying if you don't realize this at first and assume you already have all you need. Sometimes it also turns out you can finagle a way through quests without required powers anyway, which is both a positive and a negative. The plant transformation also just isn't very interesting, it moves slow and has no aerial or aquatic movement at all, so you just slowly hop over to the plant NPCs and do a quest that could've just been implemented using the water breath mechanic anyway.

Yooka spraying his pollinating fluids all over the place

The fifth and final world meanwhile has the most interesting theme by mixing pirates and space. And frogs. This is also when the player has all moves available as well as health and energy extenders, so there's no backtracking involved and your movement options are quite varied. The level is very open to promote the use of the flight power, so it's very easy to move around and get to where you need to be. The level also mixes up the boss battle by having you fight it while transformed as well as having its minecart section play with low gravity, fun surprises! On the other hand, the flight power is so convenient that it becomes second nature to just fly past a lot of obstacles and do events out of order.

It also makes it easy to set up shots like this.

The other stages still fare well, but less so. The second world is an ice world, but luckily it's still easy to get around by using the jump command. My major issue with the level is that the middle part of the level is just a big lake, which is slow to navigate, especially before getting the underwater bubble powerup. This made reaching certain parts of the level annoying because you couldn't just directly roll over there but have to use a door system instead. On the flipside, the Icymetric Palace area in the middle of the stage was a blast to explore, mixing things up by making a large series of small rooms with their own challenges each rather than being one large area of connected rooms. It also features our lord and savior, THE SNOW PLOW.

SUPER VEHICROID JUMBO SNOWPLOW IS CHARGING THIS WAY

The third level suffers from having a rather lackluster boss with predictable attack patterns and the mechanical swamp theme just being rather bland and not aesthetically pleasing. It's the level with the most aquatic sections, though thankfully the swimming controls are easy to adapt to! The bubble power makes underwater platforming as natural as regular platforming, but more slippery, while the swimming mechanics are intuitive enough to make getting around areas you cannot reach by bubble doable. Overall the level feels somewhat forgettable, right in the middle of the game.

Too much swampwater, 7.8/10

The fourth level is a casino level! A giant, oversized casino, for some reason, so it feels rather like a stage out of the Toy Story 2 game! Nostalgia!! I was rather worried the level would be a gimmicky mess, but luckily the level was more coherent than that. I really enjoyed familiarizing myself with the Casino's layout, exploring the side areas and the helicopter transformation! I was dreading the helicopter having hokey controls, but it turned out to be really easy to control and bombard otherwise invincible enemies with its cannons! The boss was a lot of fun too, taking place during a minecart ride for a change of pace! It felt real good figuring out how to get through each pattern and beating it with just one life left. On the other hand, there are still a few gimmicks. The sot machines were more tedious than fun in how precise they require you to be, one even requiring lining up 5 slots correctly. The NPCs were also rather bland here, all the slot machine NPCs used the same blabber voices and looked too similar! The other levels all had unique, clearly differentiated NPCs, something the casino sadly lacked, they could have done much better!

Very appreciative of these statues of what look like peeing Corplets though.

The levels all feature various collectibles. The most numerous are the Quills, there's 200 per stage all over the place and they tend to be the easier to miss one of. Most of these are out in the open, though some are rather hidden away. The way they're scattered feels rather haphazard sometimes though, some areas have a lot of quills bundled together while others are mostly devoid of quills at all. They don't do much to guide you through a stage, as might be expected. Luckily the game has a special power that does help find nearby collectibles and it'll also help find quills provided you've already found 85% of a stage's quills. The quills do serve a purpose, since they can be used to purchase new abilities, so collecting enough is quite vital! That said, if you search them diligently it'll be easy to buy all powers in a level immediately after unlocking it from excess quills from past stages, so you needn't collect them all unless you're after 100% completion.

Turns out my final quill was right in the starting area.

Hidden in each level are also Health and Energy Extenders, these as their name implies give you increased maximum health and energy. The extra health only really comes in handy during boss battles since the game's combat is mostly easy and avoidable and few obstacle sections are s risky that they will fully drain your health. The energy extenders make a remarkable difference however! To start with you only have a little energy, which severely limits the use of special moves, so collecting these feels very rewarding since it lets you travel around quickly for longer periods and use your special moves more liberally. These powerups do a good job of giving a strong sense of progression.

Every level also hold an Arcade Coin for the Arcade Minigames!! Most people seem to hate them! I thought they were fine. There's a big, garish pink neon arcade machine in each world with its own arcade minigame to play, and they range from pretty fun to inoffensive to just bad. I'd say the casino level was the only one where the minigame was bad, though, the others were all basically just quick diversions from the rest of the game. One problem, though, is that the game makes you play them all twice! Once to reach the end of the minigame, then a second time to beat a highscore. Yes, even if on your first try you already topped the highscore. None of the highscores were particularly hard either, I'm pretty sure I beat every arcade machine in the two mandatory attempts and didn't need to replay any of them. It's probably for the best though! Overall they do their job of mixing up the gameplay adequately, and they do get in some good game design jokes with the Rextro character, though there's some cringy groaners mixed in too. I would have liked it if these minigames looked more like arcade minigames rather than the rest of the game though.

Rextro doesn't make it very hard.

Rather similarly, each level also has a Molly Cool which can power a device that gives Yooka and Laylee a unique transformation in each world. These also serve to mix up the gameplay, but unlike the arcades you get to move around the world with your new form. The aforementioned plant transformation was kinda boring, and the Swamp's Piranha Shoal transformation also just amounted to a basic "easier aquatic movement" style of gameplay. The Snow Plow, Helicopter and Pirate Ship were more satisfying however! These vehicles each come equipped with increased offensive capability and mastery of a certain mode of travel. The Snow Plow can easily dash through enemies and can traverse any land-based terrain with ease, the Helicopter can fly around through the air and bombard with missiles and the Pirate Ship can coast along the water and actually has a flamethrower as well as spreadshot ice and cannonball cannons. So a net positive overall, since the less interesting forms aren't really used much anyway.

Is that you, Gyroid?

But oh no, there's still more to collect! Every world also has five ghosts to hunt down, these vary from just being placed out in the open to being hidden away quite well. Each of the five ghosts has their own characteristics, so one requires you to feed it with an elemental breath attack, one makes you chase it around to catch it, one forces you to battle it to catch it and one calls out for you but is in hidden away places and hard to find. Then there's the fifth ghost that requires you to use sonar abilities to reveal its hidden location. Actually finding its location is pretty easy since it's sometimes visible and giggles a lot, but figuring out you can reveal it with Sonic Sonar abilities is never really explained properly.

No, not this kind of Sonic.

But wait, there's more! Pagies!! Pagies are the main collectibles of the game, they're used to unlock new worlds, expand existing worlds and face the final boss. Pagies are found either by completing challenges to unlock a Cagie holding a Pagie, or they are handed out by NPCs for completing a quest. You also obtain one for collecting all of a world's ghosts as well as one for getting all Quills. These challenges and quests can take on basically any form! Many of them are platforming challenges, but there's also plenty of puzzles and whatnot! The diversity for these challenges is great overall, they make Pagies the most fun collectible overall to acquire. Luckily, very few of the Pagies are very difficult or tedious to acquire, though there are several instances of them being unintuitive, and having to google them does remove the feeling immersion.

Personal space, please.

So yes, quite a lot to collect in this collectathon! Who'd have thought! Luckily it's pretty easy to get around the world with all the movement options. Yooka walks at a suitably brisk pace while the roll ability lets you cross long distances easily while the much later fly ability lets you do it even quicker as well as letting you easily reach great heights. Just don't use those two for precision platforming! The game's thankfully sensible enough to know that so any segments that rely on you using these specific abilities are pretty generous with large platforms and forgiving targets.

There's other abilities too, such as the high jump and sonar attacks. There's also upgrades for the roll ability such as the ability to do a rolling dash for great speed and breaking glass, as well as a rolling shield that grants invulnerability and damages nearby enemies. These are a bit more rough, since it can be hard to know some areas require these powers before you obtain them, I know I certainly sequence broke some sections with very precise and unintended platforming to reach platforms I was meant to high jump to. Then there's the sonar abilities and roll, which interact with various elements in ways that just aren't intuitive at all. This could have been alleviated if they made the salesman selling you these abilities offer you to do a small tutorial course showing all applications of an ability.

I got here with the high jump, I clearly needed the fly power for it though!

Speaking of the salesman, NPCs!! The game has a lot of those! Every world has some unique NPCs and there's some NPCs that recur in every or in some stages. The design of these are nicely varied, though as with many things the quality does vary a bit. I wasn't a fan of the casino's slot machine NPCs as mentioned before, for example. One common complaint people have is that the NPC dialogue voice sounds are annoying, but personally I never thought that. They're all pretty silly and goofy, so in the end I left the option to have them play on and liked the game better for it. I wouldn't be against them adding voice acting for specific scenes though, but it's still a step up from wholly silent text boxes or universal generic text bleeps.

I rather like Shovel Knight's Yo Ho Yoho sounds

And on the topic of NPCs, there's the dialogue. Again, it's all over the place! A lot of the dialogue is very self-aware of the game's status as a game and its legacy, and it has mixed results. Sometimes they're these little aside remarks and they work well, sometimes they go on too long and too much though. Some characters have fun quirks, like the slimy snake salesman or the wooden sign who always mistakes the player for someone else, but other characters like Vendi the vending machine or Yooka himself are just sort of bland and nice. Yooka generally is just kinda boring and there to move things along when Laylee's being difficult, they should have done more with the character if they wanted to push him as a belittled underdog, because it currently seems like he should care more given he's not exactly coded as being too dim to care. Laylee thankfully is more interesting with her sour outlook, though it can at times become too much and come across less as self-depreciation and more an admission of incompetence on the part of the developers. It's good to joke about characters being annoyed, not good to joke that the player must find sections or characters annoying. Either they don't and the joke fails, or they do and the joke just reminds you the devs were aware of the problems but wouldn't/couldn't fix it.

>:0

The game does have some rather risqué dialogue or moments given it's still marketed as a game for kids. I think it's fine anyway, that stuff'll just fly over their heads anyway or just give them a chuckle if they're perceptive enough. It's not like that's a modern thing anyway, that sort of stuff was already common back in the days it hearkens back to.

Special shoutout to the cloud you need to stimulate to make it rain

The world expanding mechanic is rather clunky! Once a world is unlocked, you can exit it and spend some Pagies to expand it, which adds more areas to explore, collectibles to find and quests to complete. This is rather awkward though, since the unexpanded world have red herrings in them as a result, causing frustration when trying to explore somewhere and finding nothing, then later realizing the area just wasn't expanded yet. The game also isn't sure whether the player will expand worlds ASAP or move on to later worlds first, which can lead to doing segments out of order! I did the second minecart ride after the first because I chose to visit the second world rather than expand the first world, and the first minecart track only appears in the first world when expanded! As a result, my first minecart ride was way too hard, while the second was way too easy.

And speaking of minecarts, minecart sections! Another one of the more controversial elements in the game, I didn't really like them at first due to a bad first impression, but I also somehow totally blanked on the ability to shoot away obstacles and enemies. This made them much harder than needed! Once I realized I could use the shooting feature, the minecart sections became much more tolerable and another nice diversion from the main gameplay again. Special shout out to the minecart boss which I expected to hate but wound up loving. That said, the midair jump is definitely broken, so honestly never bother going for the valuable gems that spawn below tracks, you'll just fall off when trying to jump back on track. Again, consistency issues.

Looks familiar?

It seems many of these features that are quite controversial were actually stretch goals! So that's quite odd, perhaps they stretched themselves too thin with Yooka Laylee and were overly ambitious? It does bring to mind the idea of trying to do everything rather than focusing on one thing, with less than stellar overall results. The quiz sections feel like another instance of that, as sometimes in the hub world an antagonist will quiz you on various topics in the game. The questions themselves are fine, some of them are kinda obtuse and unfair but I thought it kinda fitting, the quiz is still remarkably easy to solve since most questions are easy to answer and you only need 5 correct answers with 3 lives. The presentation really lets the quiz down, as it's just a boring bridge walkway you slowly travel across. Where's the flair? It feels bare.

GOREGONZOLA 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO

Oh, and there's a plot I guess? Honestly it's a really barebones plot. Villain steals valuable book, collect Pagies to reassemble book and take it back from villain. That's fine by itself, but Yooka and Laylee barely interact with the main villain Capital B! There should've been some scenes setting them up as enemies, cause right now it's just limited to the final boss battle, a silly appearance in the casino that is appreciated and some taunts in the hub world. It comes off as really flat, since the villain had more potential than that.

Crowdfunded? Hm.

I think that's most of it, yes? The music is very nice overall! Most of the game also looks fine, the visuals are good overall, though you can tell it does look sort of like an indie budget game rather than a real big AAA game. The visuals themselves sometimes just don't match up with the gameplay purpose clearly enough and some areas have lighting that just don't look well on Yooka and Laylee. Yooka's design is also not quite chameleon enough! They're such weird creatures, though I suppose they preferred to keep a consistent artstyle overall for the eyes and whatnot. There's eyes on everything. So many eyes.

THE EYES HAVE EYES

Oh boy, and there's jank! A looot of jank! I took a bunch of screenshots of jank, which I'll dump down here. Yet nevertheless, I did enjoy the game very much despite its jankiness! The basic gameplay of exploring the world, interacting with NPCs, collecting Pagies and platforming was still satisfying, so I have nor egrets I played and 100% completed the game! It took about 23 hours in total, and it's 23 hours well-spent I'd say!

Satisfying.

Here's hoping Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair doesn't disappoint! And, of course, I do look forward to Twooka-Laylee!

And for anyone wondering whether this game inspired me to go play Banjo Kazooie? No.

Now enjoy the rest of the screenshots! If you want to see Yooka licking a Corplet's crotch, and of course you do, it's in there!!