I mean to be fair most PS1 games aged absolutely horridly.

it depends a lot on genre

90s 3d is pretty bad and I wouldn't want to play the first tomb raider or resident evil again but games like final fantasy tactics and castlevania:sotn are still great

90s 3D being bad is like the whole point. I've played Spyro 1-2 and RE1 to completion in the last few years and own and plan on playing Tomb Raider 1 as a PS1 Classic. You get over the ugliness pretty quickly.

With Y-L, I'd guess that a lot of the "we want maps" stuff actually means "poorly designed levels" and the reviewers aren't astute enough to understand the difference. They're probably too big and sprawling and messy, unlike Mario 64 or B-K, but like DK64 and B-T.

Also this whole "collect-a-thon" ideal pisses me off. The better N64 platformers weren't great because they were collect-a-thons; they were great because you were exploring well designed levels, solving puzzles and finding secrets. Collecting things is only necessary to the extent that it serves puzzles and exploration, and less is often more. DK64 rolled in and missed the point, giving you like 750 things to collect in every level.

I agree that the early 3D games (N64 and PS1) show their age the worst. I still think that if the game was considered fluid for it it's time, you can usually adjust quickly back to it without much of a problem.

The games I find the most clunky are those that were considered clunky at their release. For example the PS1 Resident Evil games, I never hated the tank controls as much as some people but they were considered highly decisive even when those games were brand new, so I'm not surprised at all that people today might find it 'unplayable' or whatever.

The whole empty world thing is a potentially valid complaint from what I've seen from the gameplay footage. Seems like the worlds are potentially big for the sake of big. Having a big level where a ton of it is simply empty space is obviously not a good thing. It doesn't look like anything too ridiculous but it does look like they could have tightened up the levels a little.

That ended up being one positive thing about the N64's hardware limitations. Levels could not be physically all that large and developers had to focus on filling them with interesting stuff.

Woohoo, got my download code!

Can you begin playing it or is it locked out until Tuesday?

Locked until Tuesday I believe from what I've seen. But can be pre-downloaded.

I'm at work, so I haven't done anything with it.

I'm scared that there is a very good chance my laptop can't handle this.

Tuesday will either be awesome or horribly disappointing.

Today is the day!!! I preloaded it on steam last night. I think it releases in an hour. Maybe I should have gone home for lunch, oh well.

I got it last night, have played through the first 3 worlds (un-expanded). Liking it just fine, delivering exactly what they promised, it's very much an old school Rare style 3D platformer. Neat little challenges and puzzles sprinkled about. I'm liking all the little minigames just fine too. Lots of good little humor nuggets mixed in.

The only legit beef the critics had was the camera. It's definitely not great, but it's also not terrible. It seems to want to fight you if you try to adjust it in a non-open area. As such I have just learned to not muck with it as much. I noticed it far more at the start and have gotten used to it now and don't really notice it anymore.

No technical issues at all really (playing on a regular PS4), the only place that showed any performance issue is the loading screen ironically enough. There's this animation on it that sorta freezes or stutters sometimes, but it's the loading screen so who cares.

Most of the other complaints were more a matter of taste.

Regardless where the critical numbers settled is probably fair, feels like a 7.5/10 sorta game. Good game, fun, if you're a fan of the genre and like old school style games you'll enjoy it greatly, if not, probably not.

Thanks for the feedback. Hoping I can play it tonight. If not I'll have to borrow a computer from my brother who is super into games.

The more I play it the more I like it, the casino world is awesome, my fav. so far. Just repeated this slide challenge towards the end of the hub world like 50 times over the past half hour, swear I came within .1 sec of beating it at least 4-5 times, finally did though FeelsGoodMan.

Loaded it up and I can play it, but it is noticeably jumpy. Don't want to labor through it not enjoying it because of my poor laptop, so I'll get in touch with my brother.

Downloaded it for PS4 today. Played through like an hour and a half. Early impressions:

Worlds are massive. Very easy to miss stuff.

There is no direction. Like nothing. I think this is a little tilting because it's pretty frustrating to get through most of a level to discover that you need a different move/powerup to be able to complete it.

Seems fairly obvious from a lot of comments that the game is not very well designed. I'll still play it (unless we get a glut of great throwback 3D platformers), but we don't have to pretend that the game is amazing or that its design issues are a "feature" or that Mario 64 and B-K were poorly designed in the same way. You can make a throwback nostalgia fest without falling prey to all of the bad design decisions of mediocre games like B-T and DK64.

I saw one comment that argued "the game is satirizing the old 3D platformers". lol

If you want to work around the puzzles and objectives being gated behind certain moves, I would suggest playing through the non-expanded version of all the worlds initially, then going back and exploring the expanded versions with your full moveset.

That seems to be the best way to minimize the amount of times you'll encounter something you don't have the moves yet to complete.

My biggest complaint about the actual game play/design is that it would have been much better to have 10 medium sized worlds than 5 gigantic worlds.

good review here

My friend got to review Yooka-Laylee and I played through most of it with him for the review. I was never a big Banjo fan and even though I agree with most of the complaints, I still had fun with it. There's some bizarre design decisions and the quality of design/levels is super inconsistent but overall it's a decent game and pretty much everyone that loves Banjo should enjoy it.

There's a decent amount depending on what platforms you're on. Hat in Time on Steam. Snake Pass and Sonic on everything. Skylar & Plux(Ratchet and Clank rip off), Crash Remastered Trilogy and Knack 2(lol) on PS4. Super Mario Odyssey on Switch.

Mario will no doubt be great but I'm really looking forward to Hat in Time. Made in Unreal and looks awesome. As much as I love Unity for a lot of reasons, I have no idea why Playtonic chose to use it over Unreal for a 3D platformer.

reviews have me less pumped than before but i'll still pick it up this weekend, hopefully some patches fix the technical side of the problems



heh DK64 is my fav game of all time :P

I think Dk64 gets a slightly bad rap, more so than it deserves. It had some major issues everyone is well aware of. They went way, way overboard with the collectathon aspect to the point it felt tedious in a way the other games did not and the way you were forced to hotswap the characters at times also felt tedious, etc.

But despite those things there was still a lot of great 3D platforming throughout, cool worlds, cool puzzles and minigames, etc.

It's not the horrifying abomination people seem to remember, it just had some really glaring issues that the other grand 3D platformers of that era didn't really have and that's what people remember. I've done full 100% replays of SM64 and BK and probably would again but I don't think I'd ever do so with DK64... I could see myself replaying it, but not a 100% replay, no way in hell.

As for YK, I'm enjoying it greatly. The Iceometric Palace (not a typo) is the most interesting thing I've come across in the game yet, very cool idea. I don't' see how anyone who was a fan of the BK games wouldn't genuinely enjoy it.

As silly as it sounds, the one aspect of the game that really pales in comparison to BK is actually the story and characters and world. The characters personalities don't shine through or leave a lasting impression, and their motivations don't really make any sense. You're running around collecting all the pages and progressing through the game really just because. I have no idea who Capital B is, why he stole the book in the first place, what he intends to do with it, why Yooka had the book, or why they want to get it back. The BK game world felt more alive and real... as much as a bear carrying around a bird in his packpack while learning fighting moves from a mole can feel real.

I got BT >>>> BK given the fixed camera, not having to lose notes when you die, and notes being in clusters instead of having 100 of them per level.


Watched a good 5-10 hours of YL last two days. Game looks like a lot of fun and the streamer I'm watching is having a blast. Can't wait to play it myself.

This game is overall a fun trip through Nostalgia Avenue but ultimately is frustrating and not particularly well designed.

My big gripes:

In some levels, it's not clear if you're missing the move required to get through the area or if you just haven't figured it out yet. There have been a few spots where I've tried everything in a certain area, just to find out that I was missing a move that I'd get later on.

The worlds later on are very tough to find. To me, finding the somewhat hidden entrance to the next world is just frustrating and not fun. There isn't a puzzle presented or anything, it's just literally walking around and looking everywhere until you find it.

Some frustrating design choices. In the Casino World, there are side levels that you can only progress through one way. At the end of one of these is a very frustrating slide with three quills on it, where it's tough to control your movement well enough to collect the quills. If you miss a quill, you have to go back through the side level and spend three minutes just to get another crack at the slide.

I agree, I found this frustrating myself, even knowing beforehand the game was like that. Seems like a pretty cheap way of forcing people to replay old levels. Def. more frustrating than fun.

I heard this complaint several times so I guess it must be an issue, however I didn't experience it or even come close. I found all the world entrances very easily. I don't see how they are supposedly hidden. The hub world is in general really wonky and confusing though. Way too big for a game with just 5 worlds and way too many pointless areas.

The flying move (unlocked after the casino world) sorta negates this issue. The flying move is ridiculously OP and trivializes a lot of the early level collectibles. The last world was built with flying in mind (since you have to have the move to get there) however the first 4 worlds pretty much assume you are on the ground so having flying helps a ton to get stuff.

Finally bought this on sale for PS4 (there was also a pretty cheap bundle with the semi-sequel that's a 2D platformer). At first I thought the controls were awful, but I either needed to settle into it OR my TV settings had to be changed to deal with gaming lag (not sure which was really the case), and then it was good.

Intro stuff was too slow and talky, first world way too big and confusing. Second was more of that, probably worse. And to make matters worse you eventually "expand" each world; they were already too big though!

But then the 3rd world was a swamp world, which reminded me of BK1 where I loved that world. And so I loved the vibe, and unlike the other levels I was happy to go through this level meticulously doing everything I could.

Then the casino I thought was amazing (indoors, so even though it's huge it feels manageable), and the 5th world of islands in space I also loved (unique alien look to it, and again it's big but it's easy to get a handle on where everything is).

So overall I loved it, even though I didn't think the first 1/3rd was very good initially. Definitely hoping for the full sequel, and will play their 2D platformer too eventually.