Video Game Review - Yooka Laylee

Does anyone remember Banjo-Kazooie, or maybe even Banjo-Tooie? They were games made by a company called Rare for the Nintendo 64 back in the late 90’s. Sadly, Rare was bought out by Microsoft in 2002. Since then, Rare fell apart. In the past five years or so, some of the original Rare employees came together and made a new game designer company called Playtonic Games. Their first released game was Yooka-Laylee in 2017, which is a spiritual successor to the Banjo-Kazooie games. Spiritual successor means it has a bunch of the same elements, styles, character designs, and themes, without being a direct sequel or prequel.

Yooka-Laylee got a BUNCH of bad reviews because these game reviewers were unfairly comparing it to the Banjo-Kazooie games, which it is not directly part of. This game was so wanted by fans, it broke the record for the fastest game to reach $1,000,000 on Kickstarter.

Since you now know the background of the game, lets dive into the story and components of the game.
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Yooka-Laylee is another 3D platformer game, which again, means it has a hub world where you can choose which world to go to next and the worlds are 3D. The main two characters are Yooka, a chameleon, and Laylee, a bat. They’re a character duo; Laylee is always on Yooka’s back. You control both characters to explore the different worlds, solve puzzles, defeat enemies, and collect the very important “pagies” which unlock new worlds. They work together to reach Capital B’s office, to retrieve the magical book that the evil Capital B stole.
 
Price: Approximately $20-$25 for PS4 & XboxOne
Approximately $15 digital download for Nintendo Switch
Rating: E 10+