A very under-rated game

[The Counter of Strikes]

I bought this on GOG so I'll leave a brief review here in the forum. If you were on the fence about this like myself, do yourself a favour, and pick it up.

After some initially poor reviews, and then reading about JonTron's removal (a really stupid thing to do for the reason they did), I ended up passing on this title.

While it isn't perfect, I found a lot of the criticisms HIGHLY exaggerated. Compare this game to some of the N64 3d classics: Mario, DK, Banjo, etc. This definitely holds up. This is nowhere near as amazing as Mario Galaxy, but this game is worth your attention.

Difficulty:
This game won't be easy by recent standards. It's about on par with said classics. I don't understand people complaining about difficulty -- to me, it's just right (it's a 3-4 where 1 is mobile games for mom, and 10 is dark souls deprived run). I was never so frustrated where I had to repeat something more than 3 times.
EDIT: Certain bosses could be very very difficult through a mixture of poor design (not properly introducing the HOW TO WIN mechanic), and rough controls.

Controls:
I can't say these are great, nor bad. Any 3D adventure needs good controls. While these are not the tightest I've ever played with, they are fine overall. Landing onto things sometimes feels slippery, perhaps because you fall somewhat slower than games like mario.
Mario games add a bit of lag/slipping to increase the difficulty a bit (such as, when you play as luigi in mario galaxy), but the controls are still perfect, and it's up to you to learn them. Once you master them, you can move fluidly around.
In YookaLaylee, things are mostly good. Again, not perfect, but traversing around is generally fine.
Rolling around slippery surfaces can be a bit annoying since turning becomes harder, and if you mess up, you end up sliding and can't even jump to fix your course. This is the worst of it that I encountered.

Pros:
- Beautiful visuals
- Excellent soundtrack
- Dynamic level music: varies depending where you are. (Standard, underwater, up high, scary area, etc)
- Lot of varied activities to collect the "Stars" (called pagies in this game)
- Moveset is generally well built and no move really becomes obsolete ****EDIT: The moves were great intitially, but I have to say that late game, some of the moves break the game itself, trivializing the difficulty --> Specifically, the ability to FLY freely. You can basically turn into a helicopter and completely negate anything that could have required skill. Yes it's on the player to not do this, but in the future, make specific SECTIONS have this. Make it so that you have to pick up some power up, that only works in specific bursts, or over certain ranges.. don't make it so you can just "cheat".
- Level design I liked. Some criticize levels as being too large and empty once you clear them, which is fair. The game came up with a nice idea where you can use your Stars to unlock new worlds or expand older ones for new challenges. Perhaps just creating a new level with a similar tileset would have been better, but I don't mind this. The levels have plenty to do, even better than some Mario 64 levels
- This includes the hub world, which also has its own things to explore and discover.
- Some of the dialogue was genuinely funny/clever
- Bosses. People complaining that they're too hard? What would you have, bosses that are too easy? Then people would complain about an easy baby game. Mario 64 bosses are absolute jokes (most of them), as are bosses in other games.

Cons:
- Camera. A lot of people are saying the camera is game breaking. It isn't. It could be better though. A lot of times the camera will snap to some place you don't want to look, but rarely did this affect anything serious
- Arcade mini-games. While not a bad addition, making you play them TWICE to get the full reward was a bit annoying.
- Mine-cart. Again, this isn't so bad that it ruins the game, but it's a bit annoying needing to replay it in different worlds, especially if you miss the goal a bit.
- Voices. Many people derail the game citing the annoying voices as the reason they can't play the game. My guess for this is that right in the start, the game starts off with a bit of a somewhat lengthy cutscene (the kind where you need to press SPACE to move to the next piece of dialogue). The characters all grumble the whole time while their words pop up in the text window. Yes, it does get annoying, but this is far and few between in the game. In future games, maybe just have them make one/two grunts each time they say something new, don't leave it on the whole time. Again, this is in no ways game breaking.
- As mentioned in the Pros (since I liked the moveset at first), the FLY move at the end breaks the game imo.

OVERALL:
If you were on the fence like I was, go ahead and pick this up. Stupid politics aside, the game is generally well-crafted. Do not expect a flawless masterpiece like Mario Galaxy, but don't buy into the hate. YookaLaylee has its issues, but is worthy of your time, especially if you love this genre.

[Plake]

nice feedback
PS: in the options you can setup the voices to only give one grunt per speech bubble (= not more grunts per space press), unlike in B&K where this was not possible =)

[Agarillobob]

wasn´t this game actually over rated right before release but then only turned out mediocre for most people and that lead to a generally unerrating of the game?

[The Counter of Strikes]

Originally posted by Agarillobob:

wasn´t this game actually over rated right before release but then only turned out mediocre for most people and that lead to a generally unerrating of the game?

I remember there was hype since people wanted "Banjo-Threeie", but I never had an N64, and only played some of these titles later on emulator, so I had no nostalgia hyping me up and I ignored it all.

When I think of YL, I remember the massive backlash, which ended up turning me off the game. Even some reviewers that I thought were generally on point put the game down (which I now come to disagree with -- much the same way that I thought the movie "Drive" was just meh after most critics praised it as amazing).

Ya, the game has some rough edges, but I think it's a great starting point, and would be interested in YL2 if they ever decided to take the feedback and make another iteration. Overall I had a lot of fun with the game. Even some of the more difficult sections I appreciate after the fact, since games that are way too easy are just bland.

[Bankai9212]

Nah, it's rated for the right reasons. Glad you liked it but the game is really average overall. Also not a single part of the game is hard the mine cart is poorly designed.

[Bluetomahawk222]

This really is Banjo-threeie in everything but name and size. When I heard only 12 or so of the veterans were on the team of like 18, I knew I had to cut a LOT of my hopes back.

[Vintorez]

My only minor issue is that it leans a bit closer to the Mario Odyssey form of collectathon in that a lot of the pagies feel almost disposable, some as simple to get as doing a 2 minute platforming section. A fair few of these are lose their value further as you gain new abilities, particularly flight, that allow you to bypass their intended challenges.

For a numbers comparison, Banjo-Tooie has 9 non-overworld levels with 10 jiggies in each. Yooka-Laylee has 5 expandable levels with 25 Pagies each.

Personally I prefer the Banjo pacing in that there are less main collectable but each individual one is typically more engaging and worthy of a little cutscene/animation for collecting it.

That said, Yooka-Laylee was still a very delightful experience and certainly got my nostalgia gears turning in a good way and I'd be happy to see a sequel that refines things further.

[JocularJosh]

Originally posted by Vintorez:

My only minor issue is that it leans a bit closer to the Mario Odyssey form of collectathon in that a lot of the pagies feel almost disposable, some as simple to get as doing a 2 minute platforming section. A fair few of these are lose their value further as you gain new abilities, particularly flight, that allow you to bypass their intended challenges.

For a numbers comparison, Banjo-Tooie has 9 non-overworld levels with 10 jiggies in each. Yooka-Laylee has 5 expandable levels with 25 Pagies each.

Personally I prefer the Banjo pacing in that there are less main collectable but each individual one is typically more engaging and worthy of a little cutscene/animation for collecting it.

That said, Yooka-Laylee was still a very delightful experience and certainly got my nostalgia gears turning in a good way and I'd be happy to see a sequel that refines things further.

Yeah I agree with this.
The pagies were too many and too easy to get, some even just had a button to push.
Banjo did this way better and I hope they will change that for their next game (if we ever get one).

Though Mario Odyssey is a whole different story.
They basically throw those annoying moons at you.
Walked ten feet? MOON!
Jumped? MOON!
Paused? MOON!
Collected a Moon? MOON!

Seriously, even though I love Odyssey it was damn frustrating after a couple of hours.