n an age where we can still get sequels or remakes for IPs that have been dormant for decades, like Pocky & Rocky, Joe & Mac, Snow Bros., or the anomaly that keeps coming back, Bubsy, there’s a certain Bear and Bird duo that hasn’t been active since their weird build-a-car stint that was exclusive to the Xbox 360. The furry pair have left a near-indomitable mark on the 3D Platformer genre, so much so that a big chunk of the development team that worked on the property went on to pitch a spiritual successor through the crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, and were able to successfully release an entirely new property, Yooka-Laylee.
Despite getting enough traction to release an arguably more beloved side-scrolling sequel that paid homage to another classic from their old stomping grounds, Donkey Kong Country, the response to the original Yooka-Laylee was a bit more polarized than anticipated. I, for one, enjoyed it for what it was, but also felt like it didn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts, especially when the core idea seemed to revolve around the idea that “bigger means better.” As time went on, though, every attempt to revisit the game after my first run of it gradually soured me more and more with each return to it—the juice it promised just didn’t have the shelf-life I thought it would.
Yooka-Replaylee, swings back hard on this oversight by unfolding the dense origami-like world design of the original into a more fleshed-out version that unlocks all of the expansive nooks and crannies into a more seamless, open-world experience, and that’s just one of many upgrades and improvements to be found in this revamped take of the 3D platformer throwback.
In terms of the technological essentials that no self-respecting remake would be without, Yooka-Replaylee has that all down pat. This new, shiny version now runs at a consistently steady 60 frames per second, enhancing the already impressive dynamic lighting of the original to a whole new impressive degree thanks to its clever use of ray-tracing technology to bring out the CGI-rendered style of its world. Stunning presentation and performance aside, though, Playtonic took their second stab with their flagship mascots and managed to breathe an actual sense of life into them that wasn’t just dead-set on chasing a ghost.
In the most endearing way that this can be said, the conception of Yooka-Laylee as characters and its respective world were always conceived to be a counterfeit Banjo-Kazooie—it’s honestly the unspoken slogan that got it kickstarted in the first place, I mean, hell, just look at the box art of the game for crying out loud. Honestly, to that sentiment, there’s nothing egregiously wrong with that, given the status of the Jiggy-hunting pair under Microsoft. Still, there’s always some kind of expectation that Yooka-Laylee would offer a little more identity to their intellectual property than merely being a copy-and-paste love letter to the iconic N64 platformer. Well, the end result was a little more disappointing. The dialogue and characterization of Yooka-Laylee boiled down to some hacky meta references, or self-deprecating humor that tried to play up some ironic angle of sense of self-awareness where the duo playfully tease they’re cognizant of being a knockoff, and it uhhh, none of it really lands as gracefully as I assume Playtonic had hoped that it would. Yooka-Replaylee, on the other hand, presents the Lizard and Bat in a far more confident light. As the scene transitions to the duo charting their whimsical treasure hunt, ramshackle pirate ship and all, before 
shipwrecking in a strange land where they appear upon a magic book suddenly levitating behind the steel bars of a cage. The enchanted tome espouses his plight, and how he was entrapped by the machinations of an evil CEO who’s trying to exploit the book’s ability to grant wishes and wealth beyond imagination, and promises that if the pair can free it from the confines of its cage, the book would gladly use its powers for the Lizard and Bat. Freeing the binded parchment from its steel…bindings, we’re introduced to the “One Book,” and it isn’t long before the no-good executive behind the villainy, Capital B, gets wind that the book has sprung free from his trap, and used a machine from atop of his corporate headquarters, Hivory Towers, to suck the One Book back into his possession. Desperate to avoid capture again, the powerful publication makes a last-minute move to unbind all of its pages into the world, and asks Yooka and Laylee to retrieve them before Capital B can—goofy, right? Even so, it’s something we never got the first time around, at least as fleshed out and produced as this was, and it’s a tone that carries over to the rest of the experience that Replaylee has to offer.
Let’s look at the level design itself, a concept that was admittedly under-cooked in the original version of the game, and one of the biggest issues players took umbrage with in their time with the title. Initially, every stage in Yooka-Laylee would only be partially accessible, gating off roughly half of its terrain and accessible areas behind an additional number of collectibles before players could unlock the stage in its fully realized form to complete. In its defense, the concept of this approach to stage design did sound interesting on paper, and does seem like a good way to set a friendly pace for exploring the density of Yooka-Laylee’s large, almost labyrinthine-like levels…but the reality is that it actually made trekking the stages worse.
The biggest issue that hampered exploration in Yooka-Laylee was the sloppy path-finding, especially when the stage was partially unlocked. See, Video Game Design 101 generally dictates that many of the smaller collectible items available to snag would often be used for “Bread Crumb” placement to help signpost other trails or areas for players to navigate. In Yooka-Laylee’s half-finished stages, however, ALL of the collectibles are visible, with many clusters positioned in empty or pointless formations that initially appear in these nonsensical setups without the context of the accompanying terrain it’s meant to lead you through—it was all in all a sloppy ordeal. So what does Yooka-Replaylee do to correct it? It completely does away with the partition mechanic of the level, and gives players access to the entire stage right from the get, something that makes all the more difference to the enjoyment of trekking through the vast worlds of Hivory Towers in hindsight. Additionally, recognizing that some tropes are better left in the past, Yooka-Replaylee completely does away with the mechanic of learning their Special Moves from Trowzer, and will now have access to their entire repertoire of moves from the start of the adventure. So, what does the shifty worm do in the game now? Well, he still takes in your Quills and has whole-ass goods for exchange instead. The stuff he offers instead is some neat cosmetic items like goofy skins or costumes for the reptile and rodent to deck themselves out in, or cursory modifiers that aren’t critical to complete the game but can make it even easier to get around, like extra health bars or stamina meters for your special moves. The other big addition to the experience is a new currency, QUIDS, which, yeah, may sound a little groan-inducing for a game that’s already filled with a bunch of junk to collect, but it actually works out really well for Replaylee’s retooled approach to the game.
So, for the small stuff—back in the 2017 version of the game, the character Vendi would allow you access to a “tonic,” a modifier similar to the previous description of Trowzer’s new goods, only it would do anything silly, from giving Yooka yellow shorts to significantly decreasing the cool-down on your stamina meter. In terms of spicing or sweetening the experience to your particular taste, the mechanic was neat at best, and harmlessly kitschy at worst, mainly because, regardless of how far you progressed, you could only activate one at a time. In Replaylee, though, the Tonic system has been totally revamped to work like the side-scrolling sequel, Impossible Lair, and allow you to equip multiple Tonics so long as you have the Tonic slots for it, both of which could be purchased with the new QUID currency. This new twist on the system gives the mechanic way more pulp for player to juice their play styles with, all while maintaining the spirit of exploring these possibilities through the economy of a new collectible item. Now for the big stuff—with the stages now being expanded to their actual real estate by default, the larger fields benefit from the occupation of the QUIDs as a new way signpost, one that’s actually conducive to the pace of navigating the dense nooks and crannies of the game’s intensive stage layouts. Finally, and this is a big one, getting around is just plain easier because of the new map and the Bookmark mechanic in Replaylee. See, with the previous iteration, with the worlds being as large as they are, getting around them without getting lost at least once was practically impossible. Even with the memorization of key landmarks, travelling through Yooka-Laylee’s stages steadily turned into a giant headache because there wasn’t a single type of map available to players, which ended up feeling more archaic than nostalgic. Worse yet, despite the Playtonic team being familiar with the benefit of Fast travel after their work with Donkey Kong 64, there wasn’t a single way to zip around the levels at a more efficient pace, leaving players with the chore of hoofing it EVERYWHERE to progress through the title.
This new Bookmark mechanic is such a game changer! No more confusion!None of these flaws are present in Yooka-Replaylee: there’s a map that’ll not only show where the player is at all times, but it’ll track points of interest for recurring support cast. What’s more, there are new NPCs, the Bookmarks, who offer two crucial services—fast travel points and a new hint system. As the name would imply, once you wake these literary tabs up from their crumpled slumber, they’ll activate on the aforementioned map as a key juncture point that you can warp to once selected, smoothing out a lot of the rough edges from the last generation’s entry into something refreshingly more modern that doesn’t completely compromise the vintage vibe its aspiring to offer. What’s more, for 50 QUIDs a pop, the bookmarks will also point you in the direction of a new Pagie to grab with a marker on your map, and a name that coyly hints at how to get similar to the 3D Mario titles. It might not seem like much, but these often punny descriptions definitely help with some of the more cryptic Pagies, and they definitely come in handy once you realize that Replaylee has somehow stuffed MORE Pagies to find in this remake.
The original Yooka-Laylee had 145 Pagies in total to collect throughout all of the stages and hub world of Hivory Tower—Yooka-Replaylee bumps that count up to 300 Pagies. The good news as that a chunk of them are a bit superfluous, like the Ghost Writers, for example, Playtonic’s homage to Banjo-Kazooie’s Jinjos, will now reward you with a Pagie for each anytime you rescue one. If you rescue all five, you’ll then unlock a Triple-Pagie, which seems to be another flattering nod to Super Mario Odyssey and its Triple Moon. The other new challenges appear to be old-fashioned platforming challenges in the form of collecting coins in a certain sequence under a shot clock or an outright stopwatch race, and again, play like thinly-veiled tributes to the Plumber’s big debut on the Nintendo Switch. Aside from seeming like a bit of a departure from the Rare style of platforming, the change-up from these new, more obstacle-driven trials ends up being a great palate-cleanser to the polarizingly faithful gameplay of Yooka-Replaylee. To even out the extra Pagies, Yooka-Replaylee also cuts down the number of Quills to 150 each level instead of 200, decreasing the completion total down to 750 as a result.
Despite all of these new quality-of-life improvements, the upgrades aren’t perfect. Much like Batman Arkham City, the map system is the total pits at navigating vertical areas of a map, giving you more of a suggested area of interest to narrow down between, however many floors the architectural structure may have. Sub-areas of the more complex worlds are still a little tricky decipher, even with the added help from the Bookmarks—it really made me wonder how I ever got through completing the game without all of these upgrades in the first place.
Still, even with some clumsy utility at times, the amount of value these enhancements lend to the game really helps set it apart from being the shameless love-letter the premiere release was, and has now shown off something that doesn’t just competently stand on its own two feet—it exceeds at it. I honestly didn’t realize how much I wanted a new Banjo-Kazooie experience for the modern era, to the point where I let that desire cloud my enjoyment of what was admittedly a significantly flawed tribute to that desire. Thankfully, Yooka-Replaylee doesn’t put me in a position where I have to rationalize the importance of its existence on a pedestal, warts and all, as Yooka-Laylee did—it’s genuinely just a good-ass 3D platformer game in its own right.
If you enjoyed the series at all in any capacity then you owe it yourself to give this remake a go, because it doesn’t just make up for sour grapes—it plants new seeds of hope for a new Buddy Hop ‘n Bop game to latch on to, especially when you look at the current status of the Bear and Bird that Microsoft has seemingly forgotten about.