From the Start, Yooka-Laylee is Worse Than Banjo-Kazooie…Here’s Why
Yooka-Laylee, the first game from fledgling indie studio Playtonic Games, was pitched to Kickstarter backers as a spiritual successor to the 3D platformers published by beloved British game studio Rare in the 1990s. Chief among these was Banjo-Kazooie, a series that started on Nintendo 64 in 1998 and is now owned by Microsoft. The Kickstarter campaign vastly exceeded expectations, proving there’s still an audience for retro 3D platform games. One month ago, two years and over two million dollars out from that initial Kickstarter pitch, Yooka-Laylee arrived to a decidedly mixed reaction from fans and critics alike. As a life-long fan of Banjo-Kazooie — it was the first game I owned, and the game that really drew me into the gaming medium as a whole at the tender age of 6 — I unfortunately found myself empathizing with the many reviewers and fans who seemingly wanted to enjoy the game, but found themselves inexplicably frustrated and turned off. Going back and replaying both games from the beginning to compare makes the issues with Yooka-Laylee crystal clear, highlighting Yooka’s failures where Banjo succeeds.
The problems with Yooka-Laylee in comparison to its spiritual predecessor start — and largely end — where the game begins, in the tutorial.
After a Banjo-esque introductory cutscene (the bad guy is bad, our heroes are lazy, but their paths intertwine and our heroes are sucked into the action), the perspective smoothly transitions to gameplay in the opening area, “Shipwreck Creek.” Much like how Banjo-Kazooie follows its first cinematic with gameplay in Spiral Mountain — a “world 0” of sorts meant to serve as a simultaneous tutorial and introductory level — Yooka-Laylee attempts to do the same with its heroes’ adopted home. The issue is that Shipwreck Creek fails to hold a candle to Spiral Mountain in many regards, and ultimately is a much clunkier tutorial than its nineteen-year-old predecessor. First impressions matter in games, and Yooka-Laylee fails to make a good one, especially when compared to its forerunners in the genre.
As soon as you take control of Yooka and Laylee in Shipwreck Creek, you’re presented with an open 3D environment right from the start — 360 degrees of full exploration. Before the player characters is a clear path forward, behind them lays a rock that the duo were lounging on…and to the left and right, a treasure chest and a steep ramp respectively. In merely the first few seconds of the game, its lacking design is already apparent. For all the player’s effort, Yooka and Laylee can’t open the chest or ascend the hill, because they haven’t unlocked the necessary abilities yet. While Banjo-Kazooie’s Spiral Mountain gradually teaches players a series of basic moves to get players acquainted with the controls, Playtonic grant their new characters rudimentary moves — a double-jump, swimming, Yooka’s extending tongue — from the start, with no explicit explanation (at least, not at first). While Banjo-Kazooie would have placed a Bottles molehill next to the treasure chest and hill to immediately teach the abilities needed to overcome these obstacles, Yooka-Laylee instead leaves players to discover for themselves that they simply can’t do this interaction yet, and that they should move on instead. While it may seem like a simple difference, this is actually a major rift in design between the game and its spiritual predecessor. Whereas Spiral Mountain encourages players to explore and discover new mechanics and hidden secrets — seven abilities and six health upgrade pieces in all — Shipwreck Creek merely nudges the player directly forward to the first, and only, new ability to be learned in the area.
Unlike Banjo-Kazooie, in which musical Notes, its primary collectible, were used to progress through the hub world — but like its sequel Banjo-Tooie — the new trinket, Quills, are used as currency for purchasing new moves in Yooka-Laylee. Also unlike Notes in any game in the Banjo series, Quills are also introduced prior to the first main level of the game. When Yooka’s move tutor, a snake cleverly named Trowzer, teaches you the basic spin attack ability, it serves as motivation to go back to Shipwreck Creek and break open all of the destructible chests and barrels in the area to collect Quills. Ultimately, this retread of the otherwise reward-sparse opening area comes off as shallow, mandated padding compared to the multitudes of gameplay styles that could be explored in Banjo’s Spiral Mountain area at the player’s own will and pace.
Looking back at Banjo-Kazooie’s introductory Spiral Mountain level, it’s amazing how many of its core mechanics that game teaches you in the first 15–30 minutes of the game. Granted, some of the experience is highly guided, but then so is Yooka-Laylee’s starting area. What is not guided is the player’s progression through Spiral Mountain. After a brief walk down a linear hall to guarantee you learn the new…for 1998…3D camera controls before anything else, the player is met with a round grassy area encircling a moat, which itself encircles a mountain. The visual design is immediately clear and nonlinear: explore the area around the area’s eponymous mountain before proceeding up its spiral path. If you follow the path to the right, you can learn the various basic attacks the game has to offer — with more variety than the simple spin attack the developers designed for its spiritual successor. There’s an admittedly useless stand-still “claw swipe” attack, a rolling attack most akin to Yooka’s chameleon tail spin, a jumping attack that has been replaced in Yooka-Laylee with an aerial move that uncomfortably thrusts you forward every time you try to use it, and a crouching-thrust attack designed to destroy tough objects. Yooka “streamlines” Banjo’s diverse set of attacks into a single press of the X button, at the cost of any variety to combat. Once you learn these attacks, vegetable-themed enemies (ok, they’re literally vegetables with googly eyes tacked on) pop up around the field to defeat for practice. When you learn how to attack in Yooka-Laylee…you get to break some boxes. Fun.
If you instead go left at the fork in the road after learning the camera controls in Spiral Mountain, you are taught the basic jump abilities. There’s a high jump achieved by holding the button down longer, which is known by default in Yooka-Laylee and basically every other platformer ever made; a sort-of double jump wing flapping ability that Yooka-Laylee turns into a much more generic double jump; and a backflip used to reach high places, like in Super Mario 64. Yooka and Laylee don’t learn the backflip jump until world 2 of their game. There is no reason for this. It’s been a 3D platforming staple since the aforementioned Mario 64 and the move’s omission — even for a few hours of initial gameplay — is immediately noticeable when the player is unable to jump onto high ledges that are just out of reach. The basic swimming abilities are up next in Spiral Mountain if the player continues forward on the path — good for their time but certainly aged, and replaced in Yooka-Laylee with an arguably better but arguably more confusing Kingdom Hearts-like “X to dive, A to rise” control system. After teaching the player the jump and swim abilities, Banjo-Kazooie does something Yooka-Laylee doesn’t come close to in its tutorial — it gives the player a test. Beyond the molehills is a small pond with a waterfall and some platforms in the mountain wall; if the player can successfully jump across the platforms, they are rewarded with a clearly visible honeycomb piece, which can be used to boost life energy. If the player fails, they fall in the water — from which they can swim out to try again. Not only does this understated challenge test two of the player’s newly learned abilities, it does so without any designer mandate. The player can simply direct Banjo to the next molehill if they so choose…but that means ignoring the shining gold trinket. Shipwreck Creek offers no such challenge or reward.
When comparing Spiral Mountain and Shipwreck Creek, one argument in the latter’s favor is that the former seems to be much more explicitly tutorialized, with the game stopping to teach you how to perform every move, down to basic camera controls and jumping slightly higher. In Yooka-Laylee, once you collect enough Quills and proceed through Trowzer’s door towards the main Hivory Tower hub world, the game immediately dashes this bit of good will by forcing the player through a tunnel in which every move — even those utilized in the preceding area — is spoon-fed to the player with dialogue boxes and forced obstacles. It’s hard to describe this area as anything more than a hallway. Despite having an open area in which the player can run, jump, and spin attack to their hearts content, the designers of Yooka-Laylee feel the need to explain that the A button makes the character jump, long after they’ve actually needed to jump for the first time. Even worse, the double jump mechanics are only explained once the player jumps first, the slowly-scrolling dialogue guaranteeing failure if the player didn’t already know to press A again to jump, therefore defeating the purpose of tutorial dialogue at all. It’s truly absurd. Also absurd? Telling the player that the same stick that moves the player on the ground also moves them when they’re in the water. This is really a thing that happens in Yooka-Laylee, a game released in 2017. The hallway-tutorial also teaches Yooka’s chameleon tongue functionality, which can be used to lick butterflies, this game’s energy currency. The tongue ability is unlocked from the beginning of the game, and butterflies appear in Shipwreck Creek, but with no enemies in the area to damage the player, there’s no point to having the butterflies there at all. This kind of design oversight exemplifies the befuddling experience of learning to play in the first half-hour or so of Yooka-Laylee.
Granted, the start of the game is only about 30 minutes long — and that’s if you take your time — but by the time you first step foot in the Hivory Towers main hub world, the damage is already done. The first impression has been made, and it doesn’t give an optimistic outlook for the rest of the game. After a bland, empty starting area — one that can’t even hold a googly-eyed candle to that of supposed spiritual predecessor Banjo-Kazooie — the player is forced through a completely unforgivable “my first 3D platformer” tutorial. Even if the rest of the game is good — in fact, I found myself actually having fun once I got to the first main level — the bad taste from Shipwreck Creek lingers long after it’s over. Compared to Banjo-Kazooie, which charms with Spiral Mountain and doesn’t stop pouring on the charm once the main game begins, Yooka-Laylee fails to stick its first landing and scrambles to recover for the rest of the game. It’s easy to understand how Yooka-Laylee averages 7/10 review scores when it fails in the ways Banjo-Kazooie succeeded 19 years ago. For their next game, hopefully Playtonic more critically revisits their Rare classics to realize what made gamers fall in love with their games in the first place.
