Yooka-Laylee

For better or worse (mostly worse) Playtonic stuck to their original Kickstarter pitch and made a Banjo-Kazooie-inspired platformer with roots back to the days of the Nintendo 64. It’s actually quite shocking how similar Yooka-Laylee is to Banjo-Kazooie. Many of the game’s mechanics like holding down the jump button to glide or using the duck and jump buttons together to do a high jump are kept intact, but a lot of Banjo-Kazooie’s shortcomings are alive and well here too. The camera, for instance, is absolutely terrible, constantly getting stuck on every piece of geometry in the game world. The game’s health and checkpoint systems are quite awful as well, making the game’s handful of boss fights incredible infuriating. And obviously there’s a lot of crap to collect in each of the game’s 5 worlds—which, to be fair, was okay in 1998, but not in 2017. I actually backed the game on Kickstarter because I enjoyed the Banjo games and was excited to see what the old Rare team could put together on a modern console, but what we got is not something I would ever recommend—even to fans of Banjo-Kazooie.

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