Yooka-Laylee, as it launched back in 2017, was a somewhat divisive game. Developed by ex-Rare veterans of games like Banjo Kazooie, it promised a lot of Nintendo 64 nostalgia in a brand new package. Depending on who you ask, you may hear that Yooka-Laylee was too slavish to that late ‘90s 3D platformer inspiration. Others will tell you that it was the deviations from that formula that are the cause of any of its problems. For myself, I actually think Yooka-Laylee is a pretty good game. So when Yooka-Replaylee was announced as a sort of reimagined remaster, I was curious exactly what the result would be.

At its core, Yooka-Replaylee, just like the original, is a 3D platformer that leans heavily into ‘90s collectathons. As a chameleon named Yooka, you team up with a bat named Laylee to recover the stolen pages (Pagies) of The One Book. To do this, you’ll explore Hivory Towers, a factory run by Capital B who intends to use the Book for nefarious purposes. Within Hivory Towers you’ll gain access to five different worlds, each littered with Pagies to find.

Right from the start, I was surprised by just how different Yooka-Replaylee actually is. The entire opening has been redesigned and expanded. A brand new tutorial segment is paired with a new story that lends more significance to Yooka and Laylee’s quest to recover the pages that have been stolen by Capital B. In fact, the story in general has been significantly altered with major changes made throughout. Once things get moving, it becomes difficult to catalogue all of the changes. Collectibles have been reworked and new functionality has been added for them. Feathers allow you to buy upgrades from Trowzer while coins can be spent buying cosmetics and optional game altering tonics from Vendi. Your entire moveset is now unlocked from the start of the game and no longer needs to be acquired from Trowzer. Finally, you no longer need to spend Pagies to expand levels.

This last point is particularly worth highlighting as it constitutes my primary complaint with Yooka-Replaylee. By removing the level expanding system, Yooka-Replaylee has essentially lost its very intentional level design. In the original game, each world would start as a pretty small and easy to cover area. After finding a certain number of Pagies you’d be able to expand the level. This would add new areas to the level along with new, more difficult challenges. The designers were able to gate the difficulty curve behind this expansion because they knew the player would be more experienced by the time they reached those later challenges. After expanding the level enough, you’d eventually be able to reach the level’s boss. In this way each stage, despite being an open sandbox, had an evolving sense of progression to it. Now, to be clear, this system was controversial in the original game. But controversial or not, the levels were built around it. In Yooka-Replaylee you simply wander into absolutely massive levels with no real structure. As a result you’ll encounter random difficulty spikes because the levels weren’t originally designed to be explored this way.

Now granted, as a fan of the original game, I was concerned that this may simply be my own dislike of a change in the formula. So I reached out to Jordan Rudek who has also been playing through the game to help me gather footage for this review. Jordan hasn’t played the original game, so I asked him what he thought of the level design. He responded by telling me that they felt too big and saying that he wished he had some sort of direction. On the other hand, I will give Yooka-Replaylee credit for taking a couple small steps to somewhat alleviate this issue. You now have access to a proper map along with fast travel points throughout each level. The map also includes a checklist for Pagies you haven’t found yet. This by no means solves the progression issue, but it does make the massive stages somewhat more manageable.

As for the Switch 2 specifics, Yooka-Replaylee does an adequate job of conveying the new visuals but does leave some things to be desired. The game runs at 30 frames-per-second, while other versions of Yooka-Replaylee run at 60. It should be noted that the developers have commented saying that they’re investigating adding a 60 frames-per-second mode on Switch 2 post launch. Evidently they only got access to Switch 2 dev kits very late. But that comment is somewhat telling in other areas as well. Both myself and Jordan encountered disturbingly regular crashes both during loading screens and when resuming the game from the home menu. During the final boss fight, I actually noticed that a background texture’s alpha layer had been applied incorrectly and was inverted. This meant instead of a skybox full of clouds, I had a skybox full of bright white squares with a cloud shaped cutout in the middle. Upon beating the boss, the game crashed on the loading screen into the ending. When I re-launched the game it simply flagged that I had beat the boss and loaded me back into the game world. I had to beat the boss again in order to see the ending.

A lot of the changes in Yooka-Replaylee are at best merely different and at worst actively detrimental. But I do what to highlight some legitimately good changes, because there are quite a few. Character control and feedback in combat feels significantly better. Collectibles are more intentionally placed and naturally lead you through levels rather than just being randomly strewn. The soundtrack has been rearranged and re-recorded by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. There are a bunch of nice technical touches in the graphical update such as volumetric snow and fog. There has clearly been a lot of very thoughtful work put into improving Yooka-Laylee but somewhere along the line, a few elements of key identity have been lost in the shuffle.

At the end of the day I think there is an argument that Yooka-Replaylee is a more accessible entry point for this game than the original. But it is disappointing that I can’t say that more definitively. There are a lot of great quality of life updates but between stability issues and some questionable feature removal, it is hard to recommend this version without reservation. As I said at the outset, I like the original Yooka-Laylee. And I like Yooka-Replaylee. I think I can say that it probably fixes more than it breaks, but I’d rather it avoided breaking anything in the first place.