Yooka Re-Playlee

When the original Yooka-Laylee hit consoles eight years ago, I’ll confess to not being much of a fan. I appreciated it as a spiritual successor to classic Nintendo 64 games like Banjo-Kazooie, but was ultimately put off by the barren level designs, the repetitive challenges and the outdated gameplay. I found the hours upon hours of collecting more than a thousand items to get boring after a while, and ended up only recommending the game to die-hard fans of the Banjo-Kazooie series. Now comes Yooka-Replaylee, a vastly improved remake of that 2017 game with better graphics, updated gameplay, a faster pace and hundreds more items to collect. In many ways, it’s the game that Playtonic should have released all those years ago. See how my opinion has changed when I review Yooka-Replaylee.

The graphics and gameplay may have improved, but the setup is largely the same. Yooka the chameleon and his bat buddy Laylee are a couple of adventurers who crash into a tropical island and rescue the One Book, a magical tome that allows anybody to rewrite the world. When the evil Capital B realizes that the One Book is missing, he hatches a plan to suck all of the world’s books into Hivory Towers. But the magical book puts up a fight, resulting in its pages getting ripped out and scattered throughout five large stages. It’s up to our thrill-seeking heroes to gather up all these little pagies and thwart Capital B’s nefarious plans once and for all.

If you played the original Yooka-Laylee back in 2017, then you already know that this is a loving tribute to the Banjo-Kazooie series. It’s a chameleon and bat instead of a bear and bird, but the end result is still the same. This is primarily a 3D platformer that revolves around running, jumping and spinning around large, open stages while collecting items. And not just pagies, but also feathers, coins, ghosts, science stuff, tokens and more. Once you’ve collected enough stuff and defeated the cartoony boss, it’s off to the next stage to do the whole thing all over again.

While the basic structure is the same, this is more than just a simple remaster. Yooka-Replaylee is a complete refresh of the original game, fixing a lot of the elements that didn’t work and adding a staggering amount of new content. Right from the start, Yooka is given a bunch of new moves and abilities, like being able to jump on enemies like Mario and other platforming stars. The existing moves have also been tweaked, making the gameplay far more intuitive than it was the first time around. For example, if you wanted to turn invisible and sneak past security cameras in Yooka-Laylee, you had to hold down the crouch button and then press the jump button to activate the camo cloak. Now all you need to do is hold crouch for a couple seconds and our hero will automatically cloak. They really did a good job of streamlining the gameplay.

Another thing they did was double the amount of pagies we can collect from 145 all the way up to 300. As you can imagine, this adds a lot of new challenges and puzzles to solve. There’s something new to find and collect around every corner, and the stages are now bursting with fun tasks to complete and cool characters to interact with. You’ll still see a lot of the new challenges repeated throughout the different levels, but there’s so much variety here that you’ll hardly notice or care.

Oddly enough, doubling the amount of pagies also goes a long way to improve the pacing. It used to be that you would have to grind and really work to collect enough pagies to open up the next level. Now, with so many pagies to collect, it’s surprisingly easy to progress through the game. In fact, after I was done having fun in the first stage, I had not only collected enough items to open up the second stage, but also the third. This makes beating the game a lot easier, sure, but it also makes the work getting there feel less like a chore. You can focus on the kinds of challenges you want to complete, instead of feeling like you need to get everything to see how the story wraps up. This was a big improvement.

There are a few other quality-of-life changes that make this version of the game so much better, including a detailed map, a pagie checklist and the ability to warp around. There are also a bunch of new tonics and ways to customize our characters, as well as items and upgrades to buy with all of the feathers and coins you’ve collected. Best of all, they’ve completely refreshed Rextro’s arcade games, giving us a series of mini-games that are a lot more cohesive and fun.

Of course, the first thing many people will notice is how much better this game looks. I remember Yooka-Laylee having a charming aesthetic, but seeing this game in 4K absolutely blew me away. The grass rustles as you run through it and the snow transforms with each step. The game is filled with new smoke effects, and all of the enemies and bosses really shine. Despite the original being nearly a decade old, Yooka-Replaylee looks like a modern game. I doubt anybody will have any issues with the way this game looks.

As somebody who wasn’t that hot Yooka-Laylee when it first came out, all of these updates, tweaks and changes helped to turn me around. This is a vastly improved game that finally, at long last, fulfills its potential. These changes here aren’t superficial, but rather enhance the game in practically every way. Most of the complains I levied against the original release are no longer an issue, and the few that remain aren’t that big of a deal.

For example, one could knock that game for being an even bigger collectathon than before, yet that worked for me. Will I ever go through and collect absolute everything? Probably not, but it’s there if I want to. Collecting the pagies wasn’t a chore this time around and I like how they give you things to do with other items you pick up. There’s a lot more variety this time around, which really helped to break up some of the repetition from the first release.

That said, I’m still not a huge fan of the last two stages. This is one of those games that starts stronger than it ends, with the first three stages being a lot more fun and engaging than the final two. Part of the problem is that the swamp is ugly and uninteresting, while the final space-themed level is too spread out and hard to navigate. As with the 2017 release, it feels like the developers ran out of compelling stage designs after the casino, which gives players almost too many mini-games to play. It’s all downhill after you cash out of the casino.

As surprised as I am to say this, Yooka-Replaylee is one of the best video game re-releases I’ve ever played. It’s a game that completely changed my opinion, turning me into a genuine fan of this series. Yooka-Laylee was a game that I could only recommend to die-hard fans of Banjo-Kazooie. Now, with Yooka-Replaylee, I am finally able to recommend the game to anybody who loves well-made 3D platformers.