Yooka-Replaylee Review
“A Rare Replaylee” Written by: Ethan (@ChaoticAether)
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the original Yooka Laylee. The game was announced during the Kickstarter revival wave of the early-mid 2010s, which made way for some awesome games like Shovel Knight and Broken Age, while also funding some questionable projects like Mighty Number 9 and Shenmue 3. Despite the mixed bag of crowdfunded releases, I was still excited to buy Yooka Laylee when it finally released in 2017. This was partially due to us being in a 3D platformer drought for half the decade, but also due to the prestige behind the title. A new Banjo inspired platformer designed by the creators from Rare, what’s not to love?! Well the game for a start.
The original Yooka Laylee was a slog. It had some great writing and fun gameplay concepts, but the game didn’t really hit the strides of the classic Rare titles we all know and love. The game felt rushed, the world’s barren, and half of the game felt like a chore to explore. I liked the game enough for what it's worth, but I’ve never felt the need to go back to replay that original adventure. Despite the ample criticism it never stopped Playtonic, who then surprised us in 2019 with one of the best 2D platformers of the generation in Yooka Laylee and the Impossible Lair. Its gameplay was excellent, the level design fantastic, and an awesome Zelda-inspired hub world made the game a joy to play. I’ve replayed Impossible Lair countless times, and it finally showed us the true potential of what this team could produce. Ever since then I’ve been eagerly awaiting for them to return to 3D in a true successor to the original game. What we got was something far more perplexing.
Yooka Replaylee was announced in 2024 and set out to right the wrongs of the original release. Featuring adjusted level design, over double the collectables of the original game and a huge rework to the base moveset. It honestly felt like a waste of time when Playtonic originally revealed it, especially as we had waited so long for a true sequel, but I’m happy to report that after beating Yooka Replaylee that I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Yooka Replaylee is a fantastic reimagining of the original game. It takes the flawed pieces of the original release and refines them into an excellent 3D platformer. It may not be perfect, but it finally feels like Playtonic have finally hit their stride.
Image Credit: Playtonic Games, PM Studios
Yooka Replaylee is an in-universe retelling of the original adventure. The adventuring duo Yooka and Laylee are recounting their original tale from their own perspective, smoothing off the edges and making the adventure sound far grander than it originally was. The game never replaces the original Yooka Laylee, in fact it goes out of its way to make all three of the games still canon, which I think is a neat addition and a very creative way to go about a redo.
After this brand new introduction the game's narrative remains mostly the same. Yooka and Laylee stumble upon the one book, a tome that grants the writer whatever their heart desires. After writing their wish to have all their moves available from the get go, Capital B and his scientist Quak learn of the book and attempt to steal it from the buddy duo. They use a machine to suck all the books in the world into Hivory Towers, in an attempt to steal and use the power of the one book for themselves. The pagies of the one book scatter as a last resort, thrown across Hivory Towers and the five grand tomes scattered throughout its complex.
From here your adventure begins, having you explore Hivory Towers and the five huge worlds found within. Capital B uses the intruders for his benefit and installs pagie gates throughout his facility, and plans to use Yooka and Laylee to grab the pagies for himself and restore the book to its former glory. It’s up to you to grab all the pagies, restore the one book and defeat Capital B before it's too late.
The first thing I noticed is just how much the visuals have improved, as my god is this game gorgeous. Playtonic have taken all of the strides Unity have made over the past eight years and matched that with excellent model and texture work to create a gorgeous game that's running at 60fps most of the time on Playstation 5. The performance isn’t perfect, with the game having heavy drops when in combat encounters or in areas with high numbers of effects, but it's a clear as day improvement over the Playstation 4 original. Even on switch 2, the glow up makes a huge change even in a 30fps container. Here’s hoping they manage to get a performance patch released to match the other platforms.
This is matched by the incredible audio design and soundtrack that is reworked from the original Yooka Laylee. The original score is here with new orchestrated versions of the classics, alongside the original versions if you prefer the original sound. The work done by Kirkhope and Wise is still one of the highlights of the game, and these new iterations just add to the excellent coat of paint the game has had.
Image Credit: Playtonic Games, PM Studios
But a new coat of paint can only do so much for the original Yooka Laylee, as most of the games faults were with how the original game played. Thankfully, Yooka Replaylee does a lot to rectify those past mistakes. In terms of the base moveset, Yooka Replaylee takes a page from most modern platformers and gives you the entirety of Yooka’s moveset from the start, and this one addition is the biggest gamechanger to Yooka Replaylee. Every world is now expanded from the get go and can be completed without having to backtrack, and the flow of the moves has been fine tuned so the characters feel excellent to play. Add to this the removal of stamina for base moves like the reptile roll and a newly refined camera, and Yooka becomes a joy to play.
His moveset really does become a toybox, and what better way to emphasise the new freedom of movement than to add nearly double the amount of collectibles as the original game. There are now over 300 pagies to find in the worlds, and a variety of modes and challenges have been added to spice up the number of ways these pagies are discovered. Some of these challenges have clearly taken inspiration from Mario, with triple pagies being awarded from completing main objectives and red coin challenges requiring you to collect them in a given time. Others are more unique, like green coin races, collecting ghost writers and completing quests for inhabitants of the grand tomes. In each world you will also find eight pagie pieces, which when collected will give you a whopping two pagies and are a real pain in the butt to find! Seriously, some of these are a bugger to find!
A lot of the terrible quests found within the game have also been completely reworked or removed. The quizzes from the original game are gone, but the highlight for me has to be the new polygonal Rextro arcade levels. The original, frankly awful, minigames have been scrapped and entirely replaced by new platforming challenges. These levels are extremely charming and are such a great addition to the flow of the game. The only downside for me still are the transformations, which still don’t feel fantastic. Most feel like an arbitrary inclusion at best, with only the helicopter and ship feeling like true additions to the world. Powerups also still feel janky in execution, with the stamina meter honestly pointless the further I got into the game.
There’s also the big elephant in the room being the original games’ level design. The levels are still mostly the same as the original release, with a few tweaks to terrain here and there. The additional collectibles make Tribalstack Tropics, Moodymaze Marsh and Galleon Galaxy feel even better, and the good news is the changes to Glitterglaze Glacier finally let the level live up to its potential. But that still leaves Capital Cashino as the weakest of the bunch, and despite it definitely being better in Yooka Replaylee, it still is the worst section of the game. The level drags, feels extremely rushed, and struggles to make a lasting impact. I wish something could have been done to fix the world, but without fundamentally changing it in its entirety, I feel they did the best they could to make the level at least playable.
Image Credit: Playtonic Games, PM Studios
Moving on to general changes, how could I forget about the addition of another new collectible: Quids! These gold coins are a new currency for you to collect, and allow you to purchase new costumes and tonics from our old pal Vendi. Tonics return and feel closer to those seen in Impossible Lair. Some of these are cosmetic, others give you quality of life upgrades, such as homing collectibles or turning your roll into an attack, while others allow you to finetune the difficulty to your preference. Want grunts to die in one hit? Want to only have one hit yourself? The tonics really do add a level of customisation the game truly needed. Also, the addition of costumes is such a fun extra to add to the game, and they really give you a level of personalisation that was missing from the original release.
The final main change from the original is the restructuring and use of the games’ original collectible: quills. The number of quills in each level has been reduced to 150, and they are now uniquely coloured to each world and act similar to the purple coins found in Mario Odyssey. With Trowser now fired from his move-giving duties, he now plays the role of owning the quill shop, giving you rewards for collecting all the quills found in each map. These rewards range from exclusive tonics, costumes, and even permanent additions to your stamina and health. It’s yet another reason to explore these worlds to the full, if you needed another one at this point!
You won’t need many pagies to reach the final boss, roughly half of them in fact, but the sheer amount of things to do in each world and the quality of these distractions will have you going over that number with ease. It's a real testament to Yooka Replaylee that despite its low requirements I still went out of my way to collect everything before moving on to the next world, even when some of the levels failed to meet my lofty expectations.
Image Credit: Playtonic Games, PM Studios
Summary
Yooka Replaylee is an excellent reimagining of the originally flawed 2017 platformer. Its changes to the moveset, camera, collectables and world design fundamentally change the game for the better, making for an exceptionally fun platformer that finally feels like the Rare revival people had hoped the original would be. It’s not perfect, as some of the original game’s flaws cannot be easily glossed over with a new coat of paint, but what’s here is truly a commendable achievement. Yooka Replaylee does what I wish more developers would do: use a remaster or remake as an opportunity to take what was once an extremely flawed game into something very special.
I can highly recommend Yooka Replaylee if you are a fan of 3D platformers and the games Rare used to make on the Nintendo 64. It’s a beautiful recreation that really feels like the start of something greater for Playtonic. At first I thought that going back to the original Yooka Laylee was a waste of time, but I really have to commend Playtonic for going back and turning it into the game that it was originally meant to be. Now if you could get a Twoka Laylee to us in an even better state, I’ll be a happy bunny indeed. Or should that be a pun-dle of joy? Sorry… Force of rabbit…