Yooka-Laylee releases in one week, and already the reviews are rolling in. Most of these reviews praise the game in one form or another, but some are more positive than others.
Many reviews state what most people assume: Yooka-Laylee successfully copies the look and sound of Banjo Kazooie. The game’s mechanics, however, are where opinions start to differ. The Guardian praises the variety of quests, missions, and puzzles players need to complete to collect Pagies, Yooka-Laylee’s Jiggies stand-in, while GameSpot is far more critical and claims some of these challenges are repetitive and simply not worth playing. Another divisive feature of the game is that players can choose how they progress; Pagies can both unlock new worlds and expand existing ones. Destructoid loves this rather novel concept, but once again, GameSpot is slightly more negative, stating the feature is more tedious than anything else and doesn’t actually improve game worlds.
Polish is where Yooka-Laylee seems to suffer. Many, including independent Youtube channels such as ACG and GameXplain, cite camera and performance issues. And, some reviews are almost exclusively negative. For example, Jim Sterling thinks the game is absolutely horrendous, despite being impressed by the Kickstarter campaign and the demo.
The following are the scores given by the reviews mentioned in the article:
The Guardian: 4/5
“Younger players may be be less willing to forgive its anachronisms but for its target audience, those ageing mourners of a lost fashion in games, it’s a promise that’s proven worthy of backing.”
GameSpot: 6/10 (Fair)
“Ultimately, Yooka-Laylee’s best and worst aspects come directly from its predecessor. Despite attempts at modernizing the formula, its style of gameplay is still outdated, and it doesn’t stay challenging or interesting as a result.”
Destructoid: 8/10 (Great)
“Playtonic’s first foray is rough around the edges, but the center is so full of heart that it’ll melt away the more you play it. How much of that roughness you can put up with entirely depends on your history and mental fortitude for mascot platformers.”
ACG: Wait for a Sale (The channel does not give numerical scores)
“There’s a lot to like here from the strange puzzling way the game’s levels sort of intertwined to the moments when a jump and a roll attack work just right. But, in the end, even at the $39,99 asking price, I think the game’s real lack of really enjoyable main characters, the camera issues, and some bugs hold this back.”
GameXplain: Liked (The channel does not give numerical scores)
“I know I’ve been pretty tough on Yooka-Laylee in this review, and make no mistake, the technical and performance problems in the Xbox One version are every bit as severe as I’ve made them out to be. But, just as importantly, I’ve enjoyed my time with the game moment to moment and the Banjo Kazooie fan in me is satisfied with Yooka-Laylee as a whole, technical problems be damned.”
Jim Sterling: 2/10 (Bad)
“Yooka-Laylee is a game out of time, clinging so desperately to past glories it doesn’t seem to understand the Earth kept spinning after the N64 was discontinued. It’s everything wrong about the formative years of 3D platforming and it somehow retained none of what made the genre’s highlights endure.”
Most reviewers adore Yooka-Laylee and are willing to overlook the game’s shortcomings, although how much of that is due to nostalgia goggles is anyone’s guess. People whose interests are piqued by the reviews will have to wait until April 11th when the game launches on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. Sorry Nintendo Switch owners, you will need to wait a little longer.
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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