The game's Steam page refers to them as playgrounds, which I think is a better name than 'world,' because they don't feel fleshed out enough to be chunks of some real place. Each is an open sandbox with a smattering of Pagie-rewarding challenges to complete or puzzles to solve. Yooka-Laylee's biggest failing comes in its level design: the five worlds feel hollow, lacking soul, despite some cute themes. Laylee says what I'm thinking so often it's sort of unsettling.īut these legacy issues aren't the only problems. No attempt has been made to make combat interesting, and Laylee even says as much in a moment toward the end of the game. I could literally walk past the vast majority of them, but occasionally a few would get in the way and become a chore to clean-up with a basic spin attack, respawning liberally to make my efforts even more pointless. There are two main types of enemies you'll be fighting: a pair of bouncing eyeballs that attach themselves to nearby objects, and a generic minion that changes appearance in each world but only ever takes one hit to kill-or two, if it's wearing a hat. If Playtonic is trying to perfectly recreate an N64 game, then the awful camera angles are certainly part of that legacy.Īnother example of a 90s holdover is Yooka-Laylee's lackluster combat. It wasn't uncommon for the camera to pull in uncomfortably close (and usually aim straight down at the floor) anytime I got just a little too close to a wall or a corridor was a bit too tight, which is the sort of nostalgia I could have done without. These issues are exacerbated by the aforementioned very bad camera. Missing jumps or falling off ledges, for the most part, felt like my fault-which is a victory not to be understated. Key components like high-jumping from a crouch or double-jumping into a glide feel natural and make walking around any of the game's five main worlds (plus a hub world connecting them all) smooth and satisfying. As simple as it is, a platformer's jump can make or break the entire game. One part that definitely did hold up, however, is the jump. But Yooka-Laylee also brings back the same terrible camera and dull combat, and aspects of what made Banjo-Kazooie so revolutionary in 1998 don't necessarily hold up two decades later. The game has the same cheeky dialogue and garbled character voices, the same collectibles to gather in each level, and pretty much the same exact moveset for your interspecies duo-all with a fresh new skin stretched over the top. Yooka-Laylee is a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie made by much of the same team, and developer Playtonic Games has shamelessly copied from the Banjo playbook all throughout this revival.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2022
Categories |