I’ve never publicly attached a rating to Yooka-Laylee, Playtonic’s flashback to the good old days where Grunty and Bowser ruled the 3D platforming roost. Sure, numerical reviews are a great, shorthand way to communicate a simple ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ to prospective investors, but without sifting through the accompanying analysis, it’s far too easy to gloss over the reasons that led to the scoring and call it a day. At gunpoint, I’d tell you it was a 7, and that’s being a bit generous. Overall, 6.5 is probably the best representation of what Yooka-Laylee offers as a whole. Last year, after spending twenty hours or so frolicking around the five tome worlds, I praised its audiovisual performance, critiqued the half-baked gameplay, and settled on calling Yooka-Laylee “flawed but still fun”. I stand by that, because there are enjoyable challenges in addition to the countless frustrating ones. It was when I poured another 30 hours into it, however, collecting nearly everything on offer except three paigies (make that two, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to summon the mental fortitude to beat Hurdle Hijinx…twice), that I perceived with startling clarity what had been vexing me:
Yooka-Laylee is built around precision platforming, but fails to give players the proper toolkit necessary for precise navigation.
Simple as that.
That’s what sucks the fun out of it. And when you keep featuring challenges that cling to such mismatched design like it’s oxygen, it ends up making your game mediocre.
Tipping the balance
The discussions and dissertations over what constitutes fair game difficulty are practically as old as time, so I won’t attempt to define what can for many be a very subjective concept. What I will say is that there is artificial hard difficulty, and then there is genuine hard difficulty. While the latter can be frustrating, it ultimately leaves you with a sense of satisfaction because the controls are responsive, the hitboxes are consistent, camera movement and enemy attacks work in unison to give you enough time to humanly respond, and any error you make is typically a result of nerves or insufficient mastery of the game’s basic mechanics. That’s fine. A good example of this type of difficulty is (in my opinion) present in Tomb Raider‘s (2013) final boss (Stormguard Stalker) battle, or the polyphasic skirmish with Captain Qwark in the Ratchet & Clank remaster. These battles are challenging because they force you to draw upon a repertoire of skills picked up over the game, but pulling it off is really fun. Now, hold on to that thought, and compare it with this.
Capital B, Yooka-Laylee‘s final boss, is split into several sections. First there’s a general swarm of bees that tails you as you twirl into the buzzing CEO, followed up by a round where you must slurp up frostberries and spit ’em out to deal damage. Once those appertiser rounds are done, Playtonic ups the ante with a slime green arena on the rooftop. The next few sequences are a fun assortment of dodging deadly hexagons and bee swarms, but that’s where the fun ends. The endmost flying section with homing missiles has very random RNG and, thanks to a combination of janky flight controls and mostly fixed camera level, it’s difficult to tell when a missile has missed the corporate geezer and is on a collision course with you instead. The result, something I didn’t feel while battling Grunty in BK or BT, is a segment that is heavily dependent on trial and error and has much less to do with skill. It’s also unsatisfying gameplay, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Yooka-Laylee is littered with challenges that are borderline infuriating simply because of, yep, you guessed it, artificiality. Too often, there are additional layers of challenge which simply aren’t required. I suppose given Playtonic’s approach to enemy design – recycle sound effects and attack styles and animations, but switch up the costume – it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. Rather than devise complicated problems that are hard but fair, what Yooka-Laylee throws at the player time and time again is artificial difficulty that feels like it’s been madly stitched on at the last minute to keep things from being too easy. Perhaps worst of all is that many of the challenges present make use of the same annoying minigame you’ve conquered in previous levels, and to me that just signals a lack of imagination, as well as a misunderstanding of what ‘fun’ actually means.
Yooka-Laylee‘s main diet consists of:
- Timed challenges
- Pushing the ball challenges (Capital Cashino x1, Moodymaze Marsh x2, Glitterglaze Glacier x2, TOTAL=5)
- Red and white hoop challenges (Tribalstack tropics x2, Glitterglaze Glacier x3, Moodymaze Marsh x2, Capital Cashino x1, Galleon Galaxy x1, TOTAL=9)
Amidst that very flat lineup, there are some truly great quests. Star fishing, fixing the plumbing, fetching snowmen’s hats, attempting to rescue a drowned trolley, and Capital Cashino’s memory puzzles stick out the most. The wacky humour is there, but for the most part, originality has been sacrificed and replaced by repetition. It isn’t as obvious spread across 25 paigies, and yet, those familiar with the genre will definitely notice. Now I know what you’re thinking. Weren’t older 3D platformers guilty of this exact crime? And the answer to that question is: definitely not. The only time we saw hoops in Banjo-Kazooie was in Clanker’s Cavern for that underwater timed challenge.
Once.
In the entire game.
Banjo-Tooie revived them in Witchyworld’s Crazy Castle along with green and blue striped hoops – you know, for variety – and they never appeared again.
Furthermore, the remaining challenges were so wildly different from one another they never carried Yooka‘s wink, wink, nudge, nudge, remember this? kind of monotony. I mean, Freezeezy Peak had you doing everything from retrieving presents to beak bombing buttons to conversing with walruses, don’t even get me started on the genius that is Click Clock Wood.
So as you can probably tell, I don’t really buy it when I hear people saying nineties classics were so afflicted by awkward design they too prevented players from having a good time. As we get older, there’s always a risk our memories become muddled, and our favourite games transform into these beautiful, infallible things that are spared judgement. Why is it then, that A Hat in Time (a game I’d easily award a 10 out of 10) came along like a bloody majestic whirlwind and made everyone fall in love with it?
Simple.
Sometimes, it’s not just nostalgia.
Sometimes, you don’t need to provide justifications or a list of caveats because a good game is just a good game.
Now consider this.
Below is one of the most challenging (in my opinion) paigies in Hivory Towers. To acquire it, you need to slide down a trap-infested tube, taking care to avoid the blue laser gates which’ll zap and try to prevent you from reaching the goal in time. The time limit is around 40 seconds, which sounds reasonable, right? It’s not. Let me tell you why.
I’ll illustrate my point using a comparison with gameplay from Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. (Video from the fabulous Ghost Type, condensed version posted to gfycat.com)
Aside from general movement feeling smooth and responsive, manoeuvring Jak with the control stick grants you a genuine sense of agency over the whole ride. Here in Lost Precursor City, we see Ghost Type expertly surfing down the tube with subtle tilts, gently weaving Jak through a maze of precursor orbs and chests while avoiding bombs and electrified pipes. You even have the ability to jump if you need a get out of jail free card. So here’s the take away from this: the precision Naughty Dog has provided in the gameplay toolkit allows players to do this. Sliding down this pathway is fun.
Now here’s the Hivory Towers sliding challenge in Yooka-Laylee. Movement is sluggish. The controls aren’t intuitive – I only realised I could speed up and slow down by reading guides online. The timing of the electric blue gates can be so off that sometimes, the initial two gates are both activated meaning you have to take a hit. There is no ability to jump while sliding, period. That’s something which aggravated me the second I realised it in Tribalstack Tropics (you could totally jump while sliding in the Banjo games), but I digress. To complete this challenge, you need to dodge the blue gates, pass through red and white hoops (of course), and here’s the kicker: there are red stop signs which physically block you.
Coupled with the general restrictions on movement, this ‘tame’ obstacle course becomes a nightmare.
I kept wondering why the red stop signs were even present to begin with – wasn’t there enough challenge with the blue gates?
But maybe that’s what figuratively knocked some sense into me.
Yes, I completed it after several attempts, but after all the struggle, after all the acid baths and near-misses, I felt no satisfaction.
Just relief that it was finally over.
If games are experiences, and experiences are really about ‘selling feels’, well, this ain’t the emotion you want to leave your players with, chief. Sliding down this pathway is not fun.
And for that matter, neither were the Kartos rides. I went in expecting minecart sequences that mirrored the beautiful fluidity of the Donkey Kong games, so you can imagine how gobsmacked I felt by the rusty controls. And if Kartos sections are mediocre, then Rextro Sixtyfourus’ mini arcade games are just anti-fun. Bizarre design choices and poor, unresponsive controls all around completely sapped the joy from everything except the Glaciators one – that was amazing. Look, when you grow up with awesome bonus levels like the abu part in Aladdin for Sega Genesis and blasting ulcers in a Brontosaurus’ stomach, you become a snob, ok? Ok, we’re good.
I’d like to stress that I disagree with the prevailing line of critique which argues Yooka-Laylee ends up being frustrating because its design is either archaic or it never improves upon the mistakes of 3D platformers of yore.
Actually, those older titles did a whole lot more right than Yooka does.
Exhibit A:
- Talon Trot is the flawless counterpart of the imprecise Reptile Roll. See image for further details.
- Red feathers and flight pads will always be better than Flappy Flight, irrespective of whether you employ first or third person view.
- There wasn’t a litany of repeated and virtually invincible enemies like Corplet Punishers, Googly Eyes or Corplet Drones. I miss looking forward to new levels because I was curious about what the baddies would look like, what silly sound they’d make, and how they were going to attack me.
- There were one hit wonder NPCs blessed with far more entertaining personalities than the pigs, Nimble and Rextro combined. I know everyone loves to diss Canary Mary, but God, you cannot deny she had charm. Also her character description on the wiki page is just hilarious:
“Canary Mary, as her name suggests, is an avowedly insane canary, and a minor character in Banjo-Tooie, who is best known for her races, which are considered infamously difficult and frustrating. She is first encountered in Glitter Gulch Mine, where she is released from a toxic cave by Banjo and Kazooie.
I loved Clara, though. And the trolleys in Moodymaze were super duper too. But rather than more fresh faces, we were given Kartos and Rextro in every level. Don’t be afraid of no-return characters like Jolly Roger, Nabnut or Snorkel the Dolphin, Playtonic. Just make them good.
Exhibit B:
- Grunty’s Furnace fun had meaning because it was hosted towards the end and included mostly fair questions that were based on your adventures. Answering correctly was a reward for paying attention throughout the game, not for memorising something as useless as the time you’ve spent playing. Also, the atmosphere was like a proper game show, not a watered down imitation.
Exhibit C:
- Musical notes were cleverly arranged around the levels to incentivise exploration, not randomly scattered in confusing ways that made them difficult to find – see: quills. Moreover, players felt a real need to keep accumulating notes until the very end because there were three final note doors, 828, 864 and 882 respectively, which lay tantalisingly beyond reach if you didn’t. In contrast, Yooka-Laylee tasks players with accumulating 470 quills to purchase all of Trowzer’s moves when there is a total of 1010 quills in the game. Yep, you read that right. 540 extra quills with no purpose. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to put a cap at 510? I sure think so.
I won’t deny there was clunkiness with older games here and there – BK‘s swimming controls are pretty notorious for this – but nevertheless, BK and BT at least knew the difference between enjoyable and tedious. The overwhelming majority of puzzles were always funny, refreshing, varied, and chock full of creativity. And most important of all – at least in terms of this article – Rare rarely (if ever) used artificial difficulty techniques to prolong the gameplay.
So if Playtonic decides to make Tooka-Laylee, and a tiny, very fragile but hopeful voice inside me will still cheer for them if they do – if only to prove to my inner child that this quirky chameleon and bat duo can deliver true 3D platforming nostalgia – I sincerely pray that all the faults critics lamented over are rectified and that we’re given some genuine variety. It’s simply a crime to make the price of admission to Capital B cost 100 paigies, and then dump players with no compelling reason to continue collecting another 45 paigies other than 100% completion or the ‘pop’ of a trophy.
Gruntilda’s door needed 810 notes for goodness sake! And we enjoyed scouring the worlds to get them.
That’s what the fans want: fun.
Put it front and centre again, Playtonic. I’ll keep my kickstarter-burned fingers crossed.
Bon voyage, chameleon and bat. May we meet again…