Regardless of how hard on the game people tend to be, I rather like Yooka-Laylee. Yooka-Replaylee being announced instead of a sequel made me scratch my head, and I’ve been curious as to what exactly it was and why it was made ever since. While it is a completely unneeded remaster, I can’t say that it doesn’t improve upon the original release. Indeed, there are positives and negatives to this, and whether or not it’s even worth playing if you already have the original will be highly subjective, although I do think I prefer this version when all is said and done.
Yooka-Replaylee has an entirely new opening that adds a sort of tutorial area in between Shipwreck Creek and Hivory Towers. Yooka and Laylee have every one of their moves (sans the flying ability, which has been changed into an occasional powerup found in the levels) and much less health than before (you have three hearts versus the six butterflies you start the original with.) But the game remains the same in more ways than not. Yes, the controls and camera are somewhat better, but they were mostly fine in the patched original anyway. The visuals, on the other hand, are far better if that matters to you (but the game stutters way too much, at least on PC.)
Once again, Yooka-Replaylee uses the classic collect-a-thon platformer structure that the original did. You need to collect Pagies in order to unlock the elevator leading to the villain’s office and then wallop him to beat the game. This can be done weirdly early this time. In the original game, there were 145 Pagies to collect. This time, there are 300, but that number is misleading. 40 of those are given to you solely for finding all the Ghost Writer characters in each level, which is 35 more than they give you in the first iteration of the game. This means that there are really only 265 Pagies that you get from doing actual challenges.
If you’re terrible at basic arithmetic or just don’t care to think about it, this results in there being 120 new Pagies in the levels. Before you’d find 25 in each, now there are 50, meaning that there are functionally 43 to be found in each level. Yooka-Replaylee‘s marketing would have you believe that it has double the content, but that’s absolutely not the case. While there may be 120 new Pagies, they mostly aren’t quite like the remaining ones. Yooka-Laylee was pretty standard in the way that its main collectable was to be worked for, but the 120 newbies are mostly all claimable with a fraction of the effort the originals required.
For instance, you’ll find some of them out in the open, both in the levels and the game’s hub (which has 30 more Pagies than in the original.) A fair amount of these have you collect red or green coins in a manner reminiscent of Mario games. All of this leads to Yooka-Replaylee feeling a hell of a lot like Mario Odyssey in some ways, as both games practically drown you in the main collectable. In some cases, you can get as many as 20 Pagies in just 30 minutes. But before, you had to expand the game’s five levels to gain access to everything in them. Just like Yooka and Laylee’s moves, this reduces how much legwork you’re required to do.
As such, even though Yooka-Replaylee technically does have more content, the game is actually shorter. Granted, most of the original content remains, but the way you interact with the worlds feels very different. Beforehand, the game took a lot of influence from Banjo Tooie in that the levels had a lot of empty space between the Pagie challenges. That’s mostly a thing of the past, as the new Pagies and the addition of coins all over the place (another Mario similarity) mean that there’s far more to see on your way, plus you don’t need to comb over levels a second time due to expansions being removed. Even the original Rextro minigames are all gone and have been replaced with a new (and far more enjoyable) minigame.
Whether or not this is a good thing boils down to personal preference, of course. There’s something to be said in favour of the game’s levels being more methodical and of needing to backtrack once you purchase moves from Trowzer (who now sells power-ups in exchange for the Quills you find in the levels, which have surprisingly been reduced by 25%.) Yooka-Replaylee is a much more immediate game that’s interested in instant gratification in a way that the original didn’t care for. On top of all that, you now have a map and can find fast travel markers that let you warp around. Points of interest and pages are also added to the map.
Yooka-Replaylee is a far more convenient game due to all of this. One reason this can be considered an improvement is that the levels themselves, which were one of the weakest points of the original game, aren’t really much different. They’re still not particularly memorable or interesting, but spending less time wandering them and knowing where you are and where to go makes a massive difference in regard to how enjoyable they are. I can’t help but see this as an improvement, all things considered. But that feeling of exploration is definitely weaker here, for better or worse.
Speaking of weaker, the original game had two absolutely miserable boss fights that have been massively changed here. The I.N.E.P.T. boss fight from the casino level has been declawed severely, as it’s now easily beatable instead of being incredibly frustrating. The original game’s final boss fight, which was an unfocused slog of phases, has been mostly revamped, making for a much smoother final battle. That being said, both fights are mostly just easy now. They were poorly designed before, but them being beatable without expending much effort kind of feels weird. Still, I’ll take it, as I hated both fights in the original game.
But you can also beat Yooka-Replaylee much, much faster than the original. You needed 100 of the 145 Pagies to unlock the final boss fight in the original game. Despite there being double the number of Pagies here, you only need 125 of them to get to the fight. Due to this, you can actually beat the entire game without even stepping foot in any worlds past the first two. I rolled credits in six-and-a-half hours without the need to enter worlds three, four, and five. This was a very poor choice, as it kind of defeats the purpose of collecting most of the Pagies. Of course, you still can (and probably will,) but it doesn’t make much sense.
While there are plenty of new Tonics and outfits to buy this time, beating the game doesn’t seem to unlock much of anything, which surprised me. It bizarrely even has an entirely different ending, which I think was a bit too drastic. But due to all of this, I don’t think Yooka-Replaylee really replaces Yooka-Laylee as much as I thought it might. Granted, I prefer it overall, even if I wish moves were still unlocked the old way. For anyone who thought the original game was too slow or boring, this version might actually change your mind. However, it’s an odd release across the board, and I don’t quite understand what Playtonic hopes to accomplish with it, aside from taking a futile additional stab at success.
Yooka-Replaylee: A faster, flashier version of the original game, Yooka-Replaylee didn't need to exist and makes some really bizarre changes, but it is an improvement overall. – Andrew Farrell
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