Yooka-Replaylee Review – IGN
Blog Andrew Joseph 08 Oct , 2025 0
Despite all the anachronisms, I have a soft spot for 3D platformers and whenever something like this comes up super mario odyssey found a clever way to breathe new life into the genre. Yooka-Replaylee remixes an already nostalgic platformer, and while it doesn't quite hit that mark, it at least manages to take the cute but forgettable adventure of 2017's Yooka-Laylee and make it more competent. My biggest complaints about the original, including camera issues, sloppy controls, and a lack of fast travel, have been addressed, and a ton of fat and non-working ideas have been thrown out. But this redesign also has a strange Frankenstein quality to it, a staggering number of technical flaws, and the same unrelenting focus on nostalgia for 3D platformers of the past, with little to no unique or novel results. The quality of time spent with this charming lizard/bird duo remains, but the experiment as a reconfiguration of their latest adventure only succeeds in making a game that never quite works into something less impressive.
Yooka-Replaylee isn't just a simple remaster as its cheeky title suggests, it's a complete overhaul that fixes quite a few missteps, but it's still a 3D platforming collect-a-thon at its core. It wears its Banjo-Kazooie inspiration on its sleeve, so you can jump, glide and roll around a colorful world while chatting with goofy, wide-eyed characters while looking for the all-important “Pagies” you need to unlock the next area. Luckily, you can now do all of these things without the absolutely atrocious camera and imprecise controls of the original, which is great, and everything from the missions you'll tackle to the story to even something as basic as the number of Pagies you collect has been completely redesigned, often to good effect.
Whether you're solving basic jumping puzzles, fighting goofy-looking monsters, or playing mini-games like grabbing a gem mine cart, Yooka-Replaylee never gets more challenging than requiring a rare second try. Combat in particular is as simple as can be, as it often amounts to just spinning attacks over and over again until everything is dead, and the enemies are absolutely rubbish at being able to hit you. Improved controls and cameras also mean the extreme simplicity of its platforming becomes even more apparent, and most puzzles can be solved with just an understanding of basic movement skills off the belt. This could be springboarding off Yukka's tail to increase your jump height, or learning that you can eat certain objects to increase your strength, like red orbs that allow Yukka to breathe fire and melt things. It's pretty basic stuff, and while it performs much better and doesn't have as much wackiness, it's just not that exciting to begin with.
That said, we've obviously put a lot of work into making this version feel better, as Yooka-Laylee's awkward camera angles and sliding motion have almost always been an annoyance in the past. Perhaps the best compliment I can give is that I almost never think about the camera when playing games because it's never really an issue. Sure, I occasionally got stuck in some weird corner or something and had to turn the camera momentarily, but since the controls felt pretty smooth, it never gave me too much trouble as I jumped around greedily devouring Peggy. On the rare occasion that a platform attempt failed, I never got angry because any mistakes this time were solely my fault.
But tighter controls won't solve Yooka-Replaylee's biggest problem: The original was already an unambitious retro game that played into your love of old-school 3D platformers rather than trying to push the formula or do something interesting within it. Yooka-Replaylee is essentially a remaster of a game that was already a mashup of old ideas, and a new coat of paint doesn't fix the underlying issues that make it all feel generic and unsurprising. The fact that it came out eight years later certainly doesn't help, as we've had more time to move beyond these outdated designs to standout designs like this one. astronomy robot or Great Vajra Bananza Explore the genre in a more exciting way. Even while I'm impressed with their progress here, I still struggle to find a reason to recommend this to anyone when they could just play Astro Bot.
That's not to say they're exactly the same, one of the more fundamental changes is the overall pacing of the adventure. Instead of unlocking abilities by collecting special currency in each area, you gain access to them all at once and then learn how to exploit them as they appear in platforming puzzles. Likewise, instead of unlocking different parts of each of the five main levels in stages, you can access their full maps from the start and even fast-travel to different points to minimize tedious backtracking, which is great. Instead of 25 somewhat sparse Pagies in each level, that number has doubled to 50, so you can see Yooka and Laylee being ecstatic to find one with twice the frequency.
All of these tweaks combine to make everything about Yooka-Replaylee feel faster and less linear. Instead of seeing Pudge out of reach and knowing that once you unlock an ability you don't already have you'll have to go back to get it, you can more or less sprint through each area, grabbing everything in sight until you've completely cleared it. Even cooler: you get a map with a list of all the Pagies in each world, so you can satisfy your completionist cravings without having to spend hours wandering around looking for something to hint at you – unless that thing is a Pagie piecethey don't show it on the map for some frustratingly inconsistent reason, so you could spend three hours searching for the last one on a level like mine Absolutely not done.
Removing these artificial barriers to progress was certainly a good decision, and the freedom to methodically solve every puzzle and combat encounter in my path in each world was quite liberating, but making so many modifications also had some very strange side effects. The strangest example stems from the increased number of Pagies, which completely changes the flow of the adventure in some rather unappealing ways. If the original Yooka-Laylee was explicitly designed around the 3D platforming ideas of classic games like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, where collectibles were harder to come by but more meaningful, Yooka-Replaylee has been adapted to be more like Super Mario Odyssey, where you can pick up items left and right. The problem is that some are still hidden behind traditional designs that require you to win mini-games or defeat bosses, while you'll find others just lying around in easy-to-reach places or huddled in places that don't feel quite as natural. The plus side is that you get a hit of dopamine from hunting down collectibles, but it feels weird when some people put in more effort than others, and it's a pretty stark reminder of how much this thing has changed.
The most extreme example of this tweaking going wrong is when, after completing the first two world runs, I realized I'd collected enough Pagies to…complete the story? That's right – I still only needed 120 of these guys to get to the big bad's lair and trigger the final boss fight, and since it's a lot easier now than before, I just walked right into his house and rolled the points before moving on to the other three stages. I'm not sure if this was an intentional decision to give the player more freedom to play the adventure the way they wanted, but it felt very strange, especially since some of the cutscenes along the way still referenced events that were supposed to take place in the world I skipped. For this reason, I was actually able to roll the credits after just four hours, then go back and spend another seven hours on other levels in the most anti-climactic way possible, completely removing any sense of urgency from being a completionist about the remaining worlds.
Unintended side effects of this Frankenstein construction of a heavily modified collection-a-thon are everywhere. For example, in the original game, you had a lot of reasons to talk to interesting supporting characters like Snake Trozer, who got a chance to show off his interesting personality as he sold you all his platforming abilities. But since you have access to these abilities from the start, Trowzer has been relegated to a completely optional vendor, and you only have a reason to chat with him once per stage, which robs him of most of the silly content and quips he previously provided. Another example is one of the villains, Dr. Quark, who used to hang out with you and force you to take his annoying quizzes throughout the story. These have been completely removed and I'm certainly not going to cry about it as these parts were never much fun, but it also means you can't really build a relationship with the person and loses a lot of heart which was previously one of Yooka-Laylee's strengths.
Don't get me wrong: I still think the vast majority of these changes are a step in the right direction, even if they introduce some jank or come at the cost of some jokes being dropped. It's so clear how much this thing has been tortured to right the wrongs of the past that it almost feels like making a new game entirely would be a better idea. The story in particular feels like a casualty of all the revisions, as you get to talk to the characters far less and spend far less time understanding the bad guys and their motivations, so it almost feels like you need to have played Yooka Riley (and memorized enough of it) to understand this remake.
Whether you do or not, you can at least easily appreciate the Yooka-Replaylee's great looks. The visual improvements compared to the original are absolutely massive. Everything is more colorful, the lighting has been fixed so you never feel like you're wandering in the dark, and Yooka and friends are more expressive. Plus, you can enjoy the beauty of it all and decorate your hero with a bunch of beautiful cosmetics while you explore. Unfortunately, that enthusiasm was offset by the many technical flaws I encountered, from sudden crashes to absolute framerate drops during boss fights or other unfortunate moments. Crashes are fairly rare, and unlike Yooka-Laylee, I never fell off the map or got stuck in an environment, but the framerate drops were worse than anything I encountered in the original, and they happened often enough to make me seriously annoyed.