Yooka-laylee is better than bk,bt,dk64?

[bigfanofoldrare]

Honestly i love a lot yooka-laylee, but i find he haves a lot little detail who make older game better.. and i really think , its not about nostalgia.

[Natsu]

It might be too early to ask this without letting YL sit and bake for a bit. After all, we replayed Banjo/DK many times over when we were kids. However, I went ahead and said I prefer YL over the older games. The sheer variety and feel of the character is just plain better to me. I understand that the game really isn't quite as polished and that the story is lackluster, but as far as raw gameplay and replayability goes, I just love how much different and fun stuff there is to do in YL. The character itself is also very fun to move around with. I like rolling and flying around more than talon trotting or jogging as a kong. There's also not a really cringey level that I just don't want to play sometimes, which sometimes happens to me with levels such as Gobi's Valley, Angry Aztec, or WitchyWorld.

[bigfanofoldrare]

-World too big
-Technique , i was rushing to get all map to get all technique.. i find something wrong about that..
-Transformation , i find the transformation good.. but i find weird and too easy wehat you have to do with it.
-Minecart was way better in dk64
-Flying technique should not exist.
-Quill in platform challenge should not be here
-Casino huge glitch

If everybody said mario galaxy and 3d world is 18, well yooka-laylee is 20..

BUT

if i said banjo-kazooie,bt and dk64 are 18 on 20 ( or i should said 20 honestly) .. i have to give a 15/20 to yooka-laylee, i find a lot of little thing made less well than older game.. honestly i really prefer older game , but yooka-laylee is good.. i just feel like this game is a project of one guy.. and it super good.. but if he had 3-4 persons like him , like in rareware, they could make it more perfect.

[FailureFactory]

Alright, I'm afraid I'll have to chime in on some of the criticism on YL.

- First of all, I expected them to learn from the mistakes in DK64. The levels there were huge, often monotonous and confusing. I love BK because its levels, while smaller, have a lot of variety. YL didn't learn. They made huge, often monotonous and confusing levels like in DK64.

- What makes this worse is that they ran out of steam halfway through and so we got stuck with only 5 of them. Man, the same effort could have given us about 8 unique worlds, but no, they tried to go DK64 and didn't make it.

- Oh, and did I mention that the assets (like rocks) often feel arbitrarily/randomly placed because while an area might be hard to reach, there'll often be absolutely no reward there? This adds to the feeling of the worlds being "empty" a lot.

- Fourth, Rextro. People often defend the game as being not a platformer, but a "collectathon". Yeah, well, "platformer" is what it said on their kickstarter page. Those minigames leave a bad taste in my mouth. It doesn't help that most are not that greatly implemented, either, or that you necessarily HAVE to play them to finish the game.

- The bosses are worse than in BT or DK64, though of course BK didn't even have bosses for each level (though honestly, some of the bigger baddies in BK make at least as good bosses as the first two of YL). I really enjoyed the boss of MMM, and it was practically my main highlight of the game. Ranpo on the other hand is just awful, with the camera, the fact you might hit more than one log on your way down, and of course...

- The awful controls for some of the moves. Seriously, reptile roll, flying, the snow plow... Also, there were challenges about pushing a ball to a target, which will never go where you want it. Or that one timed slope challenge at the cliff in the hub, where you barely controlled anything. Just terrible.

- Returning to the boss topic, how come you can play Rextro's games from the main menu, but not the bosses?

- Another one? Unskippable dialogue/cutscenes. Maybe I just didn't find a way to do it, but I read the same dialogue between Dr Quack and Capital B about five times during the final battle. Just why?

-Minecarts have been a letdown. I'm not actually such a fan of DK64 (as you probably figured out by now), and even if I was, I'd still prefer the original DKC series minecart sections to DK64's. Retro Studios did some things to the DKC series I can't agree to wehen reviving the franchise, but damn did they nail the minecart sections. They were easy to control, but challenging because every mistake meant death (or half-death) and because you had to react fast. In YL, you have too many controls, and quick reactions are basically useless. You have to go slow, or speed up, and if you do the latter, don't hope to react fast enough. You basically have to already know the track. And then it's not about making it through, but about collecting these annoying gems. Did I get hit? Who cares? The thrill of evading pits and dangers is lost, and kartos becomes another minigame host.

- Bugs! In the casino, for example. Even with a walkthrough, I can't find the last Casino Token. And believe me, I collected every single banana (not only gold bananas, I'm talking the five colored ones for every monkey) in DK64. I know how to look for stuff.

- The move system. Well, some people might like this, but personally I found it sad to have only one Trowzer to find per stage, and then be able to just buy all of the moves at once. And related...

- The interaction logic. In the sense that ice blocks and glass blocks look so similar that, if other people hadn't already mentioned glass blocks, I wouldn't even be sure there are two kinds of blocks. And glass windows can at least once be broken with Sonar 'splosion, but at other times HAVE TO be destroyed with Reptile Rush. But there is no way to tell except trying, and if you - like me - encountered a glass window BEFORE learning Reptile Rush even existed, you'll attempt to break it countless times with Sonar 'splosion, just to wonder what the heck you're doing wrong.

I think that YL took a lot less time to create than the other games, and I don't exactly know the budget or team size, so I'll give it a little bonus. It still can't keep up, for even DK64, which I liked least of the classic N64 games, had a lot of great moments. YL has only a handfull. That's not enough.

[Omega]

Yes I like Yooka Laylee more than Banjo Kazooie. It has everything that I love in a platform game, and it is more similar to Banjo Tooie (a good thing for me). I hope Playtonic makes a sequel for it, I would be very sad if they dont.

[Natsu]

@FailureFactory Some of us don't find the DK64 level design to be flawed, speak for yourself. I find it quite strange that Zelda has been getting glowing reviews when it has one of the largest, most wide open and barren game worlds I've ever seen. YL's maps are basically the size of DK64's and Tooie's. Frankly, I wouldn't mind them to be even larger. I love really large and open worlds to explore in this genre.

Also, even the original Banjo Kazooie and Tooie were labelled as "platformers." It really doesn't mean anything. There is almost no platforming in the Banjo games at all. You just have to mentally note that these games are collectathons and the platforming is just a tiny slice of the experience.

[Omega]

[FailureFactory]

[Hopix]

[bjaxx87]

So far I'd say:
Banjo-Kazooie > Yooka-Laylee > Banjo-Tooie > Donkey Kong 64

I'm 25 hours in, have seen all 5 worlds, expanded world 1 and 2 and I can honestly say (for me) it's the most fun 3D platforming experience since Banjo-Kazooie!

I really like the idea of world expansion because it helped me not to get lost like I did in Banjo-Tooie. When I returned to the expanded versions, I knew the smaller versions like the back of my hand and appreciated the additional challenges. I think it would've been a little overwhelming to have those huge worlds right from the start.

Story and dialogues are exactly the kind of humour I expected from Playtonic and I'm loving it. I don't think there was a day the game didn't make laugh out loud. It's definitely on par to older Rare games.

I just think that Y-L has more moments of frustration... At least if you try to 100% it and feel the urge to beat all Rextro high scores and Kartos challenges. Yooka-Laylee has me rage a lot which I don't remember from the old Rare games. Yeah, I just suck at YL's mini games, sliding portions and Gloomy Gem Grotto, I can't help it. Great for you if you think those are easy, I'm just happy it didn't take me too many attempts to steer the snow plough over the moving platforms.

So overall I'd mainly rank Y-L above B-T and DK64 because it's less confusing and more fun to just play and explore. Banjo-Kazooie is kind of my holy grail, though... It might be nostalgia speaking but B-K's worlds are where I'm more at home and which I can play again and again.

[Natsu]

@FailureFactory

You didn't write your post as if you personally prefer smaller worlds though. You literally said that DK64 was a bad game with objective mistakes and that Rare should have learned from that. You completely left out the part about how there are at least as many fans of smaller worlds as there are fans of larger ones. The threads on this very forum comparing BK to BT and DK64 show that the latter two games' worlds are slightly more favorable amongst this community.

[Piet]

BK > BT = YL >> DK64.

[KomaruTheHylian]

Yooka Laylee comes close but Banjo had waaay more memorable characters and a interesting story in both BK & BT.

[FailureFactory]

[Natsu]

" I expected them to learn from the mistakes in DK64."

This is a claim of objectivity. You are implying that DK64's maps are mistakes. Playtonic themselves have acknowledged that the Rare fanbase seems to be split on favoring BK sized worlds and BT/DK64 sized worlds.

[FailureFactory]

[howieb]