Customer Ratings & Reviews

Need to make more kid games for Xbox and not limit kids to Nintendo.

I wanted to like this game, as it is an homage to some of my favorite titles of the N64 era. Unfortunately, games have progressed by leaps and bounds and what was once considered solid game play now comes across as rather simplistic and frankly, not much fun. Disappointing.

nothing great, nothing terrible. Good game for the price.

Bought this for my 5 year old son he seems to like it.

Not the Banjo successor people wanted and just an all around poorly designed game on its own. PASS

If you expected a new age banjo and kazooie you will not find it here.

What looked like Sonic the Hedgeho ended up being a snooze fest.

This game is ok but it feels like it's unfinished.

Disappointed, unfortunately it's no Banjo Kazooie.

Not a real co-op game.. Mumbling for voices.. highly recommend looking up the game play.. just bought it as a last minute thing (impulse buy) hoping it would be something that me and my wife could play together.. very disappointed..

The game is mediocre at best, the kids played it for an hour and haven't played it since. another issue is the fact that I buy the game for 39.99 then two days later it goes on sale for 19.99. what a pain.

I bought this game to play with my 5 year old son because it said multi player. However the multiplayer mode is just a bad arcade type of game. The story line is not much better very clunky.

Ignore the smug Youtubers who put down this game. It's a great platformer and worth your money if you are a platform fan. The graphics and performance are fine now and bugs have been fixed from launch. If you love Rare's Banjo-Kazooie then you need to play this. The only complaint that I have is that there only 5 worlds. But, the worlds are massive. So massive that you may get lost and not know what path you should take next. You'll have to explore and be creative in order to cover the levels well. If you can do that, then you'll have a rewarding experience playing this game.

When Yooka-Laylee was successfully crowdfunded, I erred on the cautiously-optimistic side. Not many crowdfunded games turned out the way they started out to be, whether it's a lack of cohesive direction, trying to appease all backers with their demands, or projects outright failing before they get out the door. I hadn't backed Yooka-Laylee, but I did keep up with its development. After all, the developers behind the project were former Rare employees, raring (pun intended) to get a go at making a new collectathon for a new generation, and most importantly, a new audience. I did not read any reviews prior to playing the game, and everything I outline here are my thoughts after 10 hours worth of play sessions. This review has only a few of my thoughts, for brevity's sake. Yooka-Laylee is a game that I feel is true to what it wants to be, a 90s Nintendo 64 style platformer in the guise of games like Banjo Kazooie. The problems begin with the very core mechanics: controlling Yooka, our little Komodo Dragon friend (at least, I think that's what he is). Yooka runs as light as a feather, and it's not easy to control at first. I eventually got the hang of his speed and weightlessness, but the apparent lack of heft didn't feel as good as, say, controlling Banjo. The camera doesn't help much, as I always felt that it was barely trailing Yooka as I ran around the game. Aiming for projectiles was a hassle, because you need to click the left stick to enter an aiming mode, which felt more like someone drawing in a reticle in the middle of your TV, rather than an actual aiming system. Sometimes there's a noticeable delay when trying to enter this mode, as you have to be standing completely still, but by binding said aiming mode to your left stick and because Yooka moves at the slightest gesture of the left stick it can quickly become frustrating. Thankfully the need to actually aim at something is rare, but later down the line you'll get a move that will require you to mess around with the aiming mode to actually get the move to work, because the camera isn't your friend. The game's camera acts as a physical entity in the world. If the camera runs into a wall, expect it to get stuck or adjust in a way that'll make you dizzy or fall straight to your death. Certain setpieces have separate cameras that will switch to different perspectives to get a better view, but sometimes you'll find yourself being constantly switched between said setpiece cameras and the freeroam camera, resulting in movement constantly being inverted between states. Thankfully this issue isn't common, but I found it prevalent in worlds 1 and 3, or the worlds that are too big for their own good. Yooka-Laylee sets the player off in the Hivory Tower, a big hub world that has 5 grand tomes containing different worlds to explore. Within each tome lies two states to each world, a standard and 'expanded' version of the world. You'll need pagies to unlock the standard world, and more of the silly gold papers to expand the tome (literally!). I actually didn't mind this, as I felt it gives the player time to become accustomed to a smaller portion of the level before being given the big boy pants to fit in. Though that's more of a solution to the problem with the worlds. They're too big. It can be easy to get lost in them, or find yourself in a secluded area way too often. Some minions are scattered about, but they're nothing more than an X button away from disappearing. They don't leave anything behind, either, and you'll quickly find yourself rolling past them after the first ten minutes of playing. The combat is terrible. There are three enemy types, each reskinned depending on the world your in. They do very little to nothing at all, and I'm still wondering what their purpose is. To annoy you? They hardly do, just roll past them. Stop you? Oh please, enemies aren't scattered around enough as it is, and they're placed in spots that exist for nothing but scenery. You could also just roll into them. If you actually bother to engage them, they all take about one to two hits to go down, and only the flying enemies actually pose a threat simply because fighting them without some sort of lock on system is a pain. The other enemy type possesses nearby items to ram you with, but they're easily disposed of. They may glitch out if you knock them off a platform. I'd also like to point out that out of all the boss fights I did, I enjoyed only one of them for actually feeling like a proper boss setpiece. I don't care much for the story, but I did find some fun with the dialogue, poking holes at itself and whatnot. At some point it did become rather obnoxious, and I think Playtonic should dial back the amount of poor puns in Yooka-Looie (see what I did there!). Now, there is good to be found in this game. Even when the levels are bigger than they should be, the art direction is gorgeous and there are some great platforming challenges to be found about. Some characters look like 90s Microsoft help prerendered rejects, however. Grant Kirkhope has done an excellent job with the score, and I think David Wise had some of his hands on this game, which I appreciate all the more. All in all, I did have some hours of fun in Yooka-Laylee, but these moments were few and far in-between. This is the first game I've had to shelve this year, and I'm left with a disappointing taste in my mouth. Unless you have a high tolerance for nothingness and poor camera controls, I cannot recommend this game to the average player.

It just wasn't bear and bird, they tried though. I played through it, it doesn't really pay homage in anyway other than the names also being instruments and being a platformer.