Developer: Playtonic Games
Publisher: Team 17 Digital
Rrp: £34.99 (Steam, Gog.com and Humblebundle)
Released: 11th April 2017
Available on: Steam, Gog.com and Humblebundle
Played Using: An 360 Control Pad
Rare’s back! Sort of, I mean, they never really went away. Well bang goes my snappy intro, hmm…. Lets try again. The Character Platformer is back! Wait, wait, Mario is still around, Sonic too in one form or another. Third times the charm. The Collect-a-thon is back! Yeah, that’ll do.
I didn’t grow up with the character platformer genre… well not the 3D ones anyway. After the NES and the Megadrive I played PC games. We couldn’t afford any of the new consoles that kept coming out and already owned a PC for my dad’s work so, at the time, it made sense. I wouldn’t own another console until I brought a second hand Xbox 360 by which point the genre had kind of dried up apart from Mario and Sonic. Why tell you all this? Because I feel some context is needed for some of the things I mention in this review. If it seems like I’m just complaining about things that are part and parcel of the genre, then perhaps I may be.
I also feel that I’m obligated to mention that I was one of the backers for this game and received my copy as one of my rewards for backing it.
So what is Yooka-Laylee? As I mentioned previously its a collect-a-thon character platformer in which you play as the titular Yooka (the chameleon) and Laylee (the bat). So what’re this dynamic duo collecting? Well, ostensibly they’re after Pagies that have been dropped by a magical book, but there are those are most definitely not the only collectible, even if they are the main goal. Besides the Pagies, there are quills, Mollycools, Play Tokens and Ghost Writers to also collect. I won’t go through what each collectible does as part of the fun is in the discovery, I will go into the quills however as they’re a fairly important part of the game.
Quills are the currency you use to purchase skills from Trowser the snake… yes they made that joke. You’ll be needing these skills to complete some of the challenges and even navigate the various worlds you’ll be playing through. There’s quite a lot of back tracking needed to be done in order to get enough Pagies to progress and you’ll need these skills.
The Pagies can be used to open new worlds to explore and expand existing ones. Now you may wonder why you would bother to expand a world? The reasons are simple. To get more Pagies of course! Think of it as an investment, you might spend ten Pagies expanding the world but this expansion allows you to potentially grab another thirty Pagies.
This game is beautiful, with worlds that are vibrantly coloured. The designers have gone for a more cartoon-esque style to the whole affair. I loved wandering the worlds and exploring as much as I could especially once I had unlocked some of the abilities in the late game. If I do have one complaint about the games worlds I actually have to focus my attention on the hub world ‘Hivory Tower’. I felt that this world was overly complicated, causing me quite a lot of frustration. It was only through sheer luck that I found the way to one of the later stages as I didn’t see any clues for it at all.
Yooka-Laylee isn’t without its problems of course, I found myself wondering a few things such as; Why was the quit button hidden in the options menu rather than on the main menu? On that note did they really have to give each option a noise? It was cute at first but grew more obnoxious with each time I used it.
There’s also some game dialogue that is unskippable, which can be quite annoying when you have to repeat the dialogue after losing a boss fight.
Even with these problems I still feel that Playtonic have succeeded in what they set out to do. They created a nineties style collect-a-thon character platformer that wouldn’t have gone amiss on a console like a Playstation or Xbox (graphics withstanding of course).
I did stop playing shortly after I was informed by the game that I needed one hundred Pagies to progress, especially as finding them was becoming very difficult. It just felt… Arbitrary, and yes I am aware of the fact that this ‘arbitrary-ness’ is a core part of what makes a collect-a-thon a collect-a-thon, it just felt like it was too much at that point.
Final thoughts time. Well as I mentioned earlier, this game seems to me to be a success at least in so far as Playtonic have succeeded in creating the game they wished to. That being said, I feel like a few things could’ve been improved and after a while the game began to feel a little stale. Mileage will vary from person to person of course. I just have never been one to be a completionist.
((Note: Thankfully, having read through the notes of some of the forthcoming updates it seems that the menu noises will have a option to be reduced, as well as the unskippable repeated dialogue.))
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