Yooka-Laylee Review

Yooka-Laylee is a running, jumping, collecting and exploration game where you play a pair of animal friends: a chameleon called Yooka and a bat called Laylee. They act as one, each contributing different abilities, on a quest to retrieve a magical book from an evil corporation.

It's from some of the people who made the classic Banjo-Kazooie games, where you find and collect items in a large open world. These are similar to the more recent Lego games but with less hand-holding and larger environments.

In this game, you are collecting quills and book pages to progress. This starts quite easily but you soon encounter challenges, puzzles, races and interactions to unlock areas and gain more pages and abilities.

The novelty is the complexity and beautifully hand-crafted nature of the worlds you explore. While dramatic classical music plays, you must explore every inch to find all the hidden items. As you progress, you can trigger changes in the world that then enable you to access hard to reach areas. You have to pay attention to the detail of the worlds, and are actually quizzed about this at certain points in the game.