Yooka Re-Playlee: Review - Playtonic's Live and Reloaded Shouldn’t Be Missed

One of the first consoles I have rooted memories with is with the Nintendo 64. I remember watching my mom play Namco Museum 64, while my dad and aunt were obsessed over Banjo-Kazooie. Eventually my brother and I got a hold of the N64 and all the games that came with it. Banjo always stuck out, it made us laugh with its goofy characters and just overall appeal.

Nostalgia is a powerful drug, and there’s no better high than seeing a spiritual successor to a childhood favorite. 2017’s Yooka Laylee laid a good foundation for the modern day collectathon, but was bogged down by the abundance of annoyances of yesteryear. Yooka felt too floaty for sections that required precise platforming. The camera often worked against the player resulting in impossible, warped angles. Long story short, while it does possess the charm of the N64 days it also carries over its shortcomings resulting in a “good try” rather than another notch on the belt.

Yooka Re-Playlee aims to address all of the criticisms of the original release and finally give Yooka and Laylee the adventure they deserve. The result is a charming and addictive platformer that, while it doesn't reinvent the genre by any means, I cannot recommend if collectathons are your bread and butter. Whether you’ve played the original game or not, this is just such a well crafted adventure that anybody regardless of prior Yooka experience can enjoy it. By the time the credits rolled, I was ready to go back in and find everything I missed. If the credits roll and all you wanna do is keep playing, trust me that’s the best feeling to get with a game.

Yooka and Laylee, a pair of a lizard and a bat, are treasure hunters always on the hunt for a good score. Upon crash landing on an island with their ship, they come across an entity known as the One-Book, where anything written in the book is to be perceived as fact. The glaringly evil Capital B, CEO of Hivory Towers driven only by profit, wants to seize all of the world’s literature in order to monopolize the book industry. In an attempt to save itself during capture, the One-Book releases all of its pages, called Pagies, throughout the world and it’s up to you to get them all back and keep the universe as is.

It’s a simple plot, and all of the characters speak in short gibberish tones just like in Banjo. This was seen as a knock back in the original release, but it’s EXACTLY how the “voice acting” used to be. Clearly this method wasn’t used to save money on voice actors (though I’m sure it helps), it’s just a call back for how it used to be. That hasn’t changed in the remake, but it didn’t need to. I didn’t really find the voices to be anything strenuous, but I also come from years of Banjo mumbling. 

What does carry the story is its writing. Comedy is subjective of course but given the nature of the game, and the fact that it IS technically for kids, I found the writing to be more witty than cringe and I found myself genuinely cracking up more than I expected to. Now I say this game is for kids but the devs are fully aware that adults like myself who grew up on Banjo would come around for this so there are some more risque jokes for that crowd. For example, Yooka’s ship is called the Bat Ship Crazy. There are plenty others, but a joke can't be funny if you already know the punchline right? You’ll have to witness its tongue-in-cheek humor for yourself.

Upon starting the game, Yooka Re-Playlee left a strong first impression on me. I previously mentioned that two of the major criticisms from the original title were general control and the camera. Mind you, this IS a platformer and if the game just doesn’t feel good to control then that’s a scary sign of what’s yet to come. Thankfully, Yooka controls tighter than a snare drum. The second I started controlling Yooka, he just felt so responsive and I truly felt 1:1 with this character and that sense of control never wavered.

The camera is also a night and day difference. The camera has pitched itself back giving a higher field of view to your peripherals and the camera doesn’t feel like a physical one that gets stuck on the geometry of the world just like before. There are even moments where the camera is fixed in place to showcase everything you need to see to focus on just the platforming. Very rarely did I ever have an issue with the camera in the remake, which is nothing short of great news. 

It seems weird to focus on points like these, right? So he can move and the camera’s zoomed out, big deal right? Understand back in the original game, simple platforming sections became arduous because the game simply didn’t feel as great as it should’ve due to how the game controlled.

Even other modern platformers such as Sonic Frontiers struggle with basic movement, and mind you I quite enjoyed Frontiers. Sonic felt damn near impossible to precisely control because he’s so fast, which yeah makes sense but makes it annoying to climb basic towers. Apples to oranges, I know, but my point stands. The basic moveset just feels so good that the simple art of platforming never got tiresome which is vital to a game where all you’re doing is platforming and collecting. 

In the original game, there were some sections blocked off that you’d have to come back to with abilities you’d earn later on. Thankfully, Yooka and Laylee have every move right from the get go, completely bypassing one of the most annoying aspects about the original game. This opens up every location right from the second you enter, and each location is a joy to explore.

For starters, the game has a much more vibrant presentation. The environments all feel so full of life with swaying trees, plenty of effects throughout the air, enemies to fight, NPCs to discover, Pagies to find, Quills exclusive to the location, there’s plenty to see and snatch. It’s just good fun finding a new world to get lost in, seeing something off in the distance and then travelling on over to that location whilst getting distracted along the way. 

What’s nice is how easily digestible everything is as well. While yes, again, the game is meant to appeal to children but it doesn’t matter how old you are, the instant gratification of completing challenges and watching your Pagie count go up never lost its luster. It feels great to solve a challenge or puzzle, especially since more often than not the game doesn’t outright tell you what to do, you just have to figure it out. It encourages discovery, and constantly finding new things to collect feels great.

There are a total of five worlds which are called Grand Tomes. All five Grand Tomes are intertwined within one big level, the aforementioned Hivory Towers. Once you collect a certain number of Pagies, the door to the next Grand Tome will open. Think Peach’s Castle back from Super Mario 64, same concept. Hivory Towers can be fun to explore as it also contains its own set of hidden Pagies to find.

This does however lead to an annoyance that you still have to travel from one Grand Tome to the other despite the game having a new map and fast travel system. Because Hivory Towers is one big level in of itself, it can just be annoying having to go from one world to the next because there’s no way to mitigate that runback, and as the game progresses the runback only gets longer. You can access Quill shops from other worlds irregardless of Grand Tome, why not allow for fast travel between worlds as well?

Yes, you did read that right, Yooka Re-Playlee contains a map. This is taken straight out of more recent Nintendo games, specifically Super Mario Odyssey and Donkey Kong Bananza. Each location has a map with its own checklist for the specific Pagies. Over time this will make it easier when you inevitably give up and are looking for the last one. This is a great way to keep track of what you’re collecting, and I’m more than okay with checklists being adapted this way in any collectathon going forward.

However, the map introduced a rather weird issue for me. There are moments where I played Yooka Re-Playlee with a PS5 controller, a DualSense. The game does have native PS controller support, as the button prompts show PlayStation icons. However, to open up the map on an Xbox controller, you have to press the Back button. The reason I told you the Xbox input, is because the game simply doesn’t have one for PlayStation controllers.

In case you can’t see what the problem is, these are two different buttons for two different controllers.

What this means is if you’re playing the game with a PlayStation controller you simply won’t be able to access the map unless you were to press the button on a keyboard. But none of the controls can be remapped either. The control scheme isn’t hard to grasp, but not being able to change it is worth mentioning, and this is an issue that persists in the full release.

Yooka Re-Playlee also claims to be Steam Deck verified and I got to test it out for myself. The game looks great on the OLED, and performance is stable. With the build I played, the game didn’t feature graphic options on the Steam Deck which was odd. I was warned ahead of time that this was an issue prior, but with the official release the Steam Deck features resolution as well as graphic quality options. As you could imagine, a game like this is absolutely perfect for the Deck and I easily spent some hours with it. Four hours of play time on a full charge by the way!

With this being a remake, the soundtrack did also get touched up as well as the visuals. This is where things are going to become truly subjective, in other words: full opinion warning. Truth be told, I did not enjoy the revised soundtrack as much as the original. It definitely takes a bit of a backseat to the gameplay with more serene melodies whereas the original was very whimsical and bouncy. 

The differences between Shipwreck Creek’s theme in particular highlights this perfectly. Mind you, the revision I don’t think is lacking in sort of quality. I just prefer the more quirky tones of the original as it's more akin to Banjo’s soundtrack compared to this more ‘cinematic’ revision. Luckily, with the returning Tonic system they’ve added a Tonic which allows you to listen to the original soundtrack should you choose to, in case you feel the same way I did. Tonics, are gameplay and visual modifiers. You can equip more than one and buy more slots which is another welcome change from the original. 

Truth be told, in terms of other forms of glaring faults there really aren’t any. Sometimes the camera can be a bit jerky still when it’s really close but that’s me just looking for something to complain about. With a $30 price tag, it took me about 9 hours to beat the main story where you have to collect at least 120 of the 300 available Pagies. By the end of the game I had 143, and soon I plan to collect them all. In a world where every cent counts, I think Yooka Re-Playlee is an absolute steal in terms of value.

Yooka and Laylee comfortably deserve to sit among the big kids of modern platforming. Anybody who’s a fan of 3D platformers and or collectathons, Yooka Re-Playlee needs to stay on your radar. It’s truly an enjoyable game from start to finish. 

After playing 70 hours of Borderlands 4 with relentless nonstop killing, getting to relax with a simple, fun, and charming platformer was the palette cleanser I didn’t know I needed. The charm of Yooka Re-Playlee is one that will pull you in and won’t let you go.

Final Score: 9/10 - highly recommend this one!