![]() One bad level out of five has a greater impact on the overall game. With about 16 hours of gameplay, Yooka-Laylee isn't a short game, but having only five different levels makes it very important that each one is fun. Those can be expanded with more pages to open up more areas within them. For better or worse, there are only five worlds we can unlock by finding the pages. They are also used to progress through the game. Our main collectibles are the pages from that magical book, which are littered throughout the hub world and the levels. There's a semi-open hub world that connects a few enclosed areas where we have to find stuff. The setup is not too different from what you'd find in the classics. This is a minor gripe I have with the setup, and it doesn't carry much weight if the rest of the game is fun. It feels like it's all over the place - and not in a good way. However, Banjo-Kazooie didn't have a fleshed-out story, either, but at least it identified the direct intentions of the characters and why they did what they did, but Yooka-Laylee doesn't deliver on that at all. It might be nit-picky to criticize the story of a 3-D collect-a-thon platformer. Without any proper reason about why the book exists or why Yooka and Laylee may even be interested in risking their lives for it, it's time to infiltrate the factory to retrieve the golden pages and put the book back together. It magically lifts off into the factory and loses all of its valuable golden paper inserts. Quack, go about their book-stealing business, the jumping duo of Yooka and Laylee happens to be casually sunbathing outside the factory with a weird book that they've stumbled upon - and it has golden pages. Just as Capital B and his second-in-command, Dr. Antagonist Capital B, a cross between a bee and a human, is in the process of stealing books to find a special one with golden pages. The 3-D platformer genre isn't known for their storytelling or world-building, and Yooka-Laylee is not interested in changing that. A lizard with a box-shaped head and a bat are surely not weirder than a bear with a bird in his backpack. The main protagonists Yooka and Laylee couldn't be closer to the original jumping duo in Rare's classic. The heavy-trotting Kirkhope soundtrack instantly draws you into flashbacks of Banjo, and it doesn't stop there. Yooka-Laylee manages to only check one of those boxes properly. Yes, you want fan service, and you want to trigger fond memories of yesteryear, but you also want to create an experience that stands on its own and can break new ground. That's the main thing to consider when jumping into a remake or spiritual successor of older titles. Those games were great back then and still hold up to a certain degree, but if they were released as new games today, they wouldn't hold up too well. We all have fond memories of the games of our youth: afternoons in the arcade, game marathons, and genre-defining titles. ![]() The problem with retro gaming is rose-tinted glasses.
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