Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair Reviews

A very well crafted game, with good water levels, and a baller OST.

It is kind of boring in my opinion. I don't really like the artstyle and levels. It just didn't seem to be worth my time.

this is a fun lil platforming adventure, really enjoyed my time with it

No where near as fun as the original. I managed to pick this one up super cheap and I am so glad I didn't waste too much on this one. Unlike the first one, most of this is spend as a side scroller platformer with slide-y physics. Its hard to judge things before you run into them, or onto them. I don't think I completed one level without dying a few times. To me this one isnt fun, if you haven't played the first one, go play that one.

Pain Points: Very generic level theming, visual design in general that felt like B grade (I just got tired of playing "new" levels), controls *almost* felt great but you retain momentum a bit too much in certain areas (cannon chaining level, parts of the Impossible Lair), the Impossible Lair doesn't scale properly in difficulty so chapter 2 is by far the hardest (easier escape sequence was fine though), Tonic system felt very much tacked on (them being useless in the final level made the strong ones pointless to collect), combat is janky with airborne collisions leading to me taking damage or getting away with a hit for reason I couldn't describe Overall its pretty solid, but its lacking in charm and isn't mechanically tight enough to justify that. I enjoyed the final level, it is disproprtionately hard though. I'm fine with the difficulty, but the game isn't interesting or solid enough for me to try and hone my skill in perfecting the titural Impossible Lair. Worth on sale, I got it for like 3 bucks, but it made me want to try the games this was inspired by, because they look better and might very well play better too. I had heard extremely high praise of this game, I was disappointed to an extent, but after the first bit I warmed up and stuck out until final completion

This one issue probably summarizes a lot of what this game is struggling with: There is a "hint" in the game that you have to buy to unlock that literally just tells you to go look online. Also it is incredible how they keep managing to utterly ruin their games by making the very end of it completely unbearable. It's just torture and really, really poorly made.

Overall more good than bad, however designing a final boss that takes ~30 minutes to complete that is extremely difficult with with no checkpoints is just poor game design. I understand that it's called the Impossible Lair for a reason, but don't have a sudden extreme difficulty spike at the very end; try to progressively build to that throughout the game. The rest of the game is pretty good and would recommend playing if 2.5D platformers are your jam. 15 hours for a sale price of $3 is worth it - you get 40 levels with a bunch of overworld puzzles to solve as well. Overall the developers did a good job with about 95% of this game and that alone warrants the thumbs up.

Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair is described as having been made by "some of the key creative talent behind Donkey Kong Country", which immediately got me excited. The DKC games were some of my favorites growing up, and DKC Returns / DKC Tropical Freeze were amazing games as well. This game looks like them, and some of the hallmarks are there (good music, side-scrolling gameplay, detailed backgrounds, barrels!) but just doesn't come together. While I have not quite made it through the entire game before deciding to give up on it, the final challenge is particularly awful - your task is to explore the overworld, finish levels and collect bees on the way that protect you during that big, long final level which you can attempt at any time. Theoretically, the longer you play the game, the easier the final level will get. It sounds cool in theory, but the final level (I played some of it and saw the rest in videos) is just too long (30 minutes or so), too drawn-out, too tedious and too punishing if you die because you have to do the entire level from the beginning with no checkpoints. Even with 40 bees protecting you, you will have a hard time unless you are a platforming god because the difficulty ramps up so fast and sudden, while the rest of the game is relatively easy (but made harder thanks to the slippery controls and really weird jumping feeling). The overworld is a nice idea and so are the tonics that can alter the graphics or make the game harder/easier (but which also can't be used in the final level, so what is even the point?), but even aside from the final level, the game is just lacking some of the charm that can be found in other platformers like DKC. It looks like it, but doesn't play like it and I think it fundamentally misunderstands what made those games (and even the Wii / Switch titles) in the DKC series so fun. Momentum is weird, jumping is awkward, collectibles can be missed very easily by just missing a jump or bouncing off an enemy wrong and then you have to restart the entire level or from the last checkpoint, if you were lucky enough to have one close by - oh, and you have to die, because there is no option in the menu to just restart from the last checkpoint. The game also has some weird (though this might be a personal issue) problems with what I expect to happen vs. what does. Holding A should let me bounce off enemies and platforms higher, but you have to press A exactly when hitting the enemy / platform, which feels wrong and doesn't feel good. There is a tail flutter move in the air that lets you glide shortly, but the animation looks like it should hit enemies and damage them, but it doesn't, which is extremely confusing. Clarity in these platformers is incredibly important, but the controls often don't come together well enough. Overall, it just feels like tedium, slowly working towards solving a challenge that, in the end, you will only solve through brute forcing and pattern memorization, if that. I quit before I even got all the bees because I do not want to try smashing my head through that wall, but even if you have a lot of patience, the game has some fundamental control issues that make it less fun than other, similar platformers - overall, there are many ideas, some of which are good, some of which less so, but it doesn't make a cohesive, fun whole after the initial positive impression.