its screenshots look so pretty i think "there's no way that can be bad.

It's a decent collectathon platformer. No more, no less. with some annoying mini-games.

If you played the Banjo games, it's pretty much what you'd get. I didn't so it was a pretty fresh experience for me. I still consider it a decent game. It's just a bit disappointing considering the talent behind it. A Hat in Time is a better game, but Yooka-Laylee shouldn't be overlooked.

It depends on how you feel.

It doesn't actually bring anything to revive the once dead genre, and many of the transformations are afterthoughts, at best.

It's almost a Cut and paste of banjo kazooie with ultra slippery controls

Objectively? No.

It is not as good as classic Rare games, this is undeniable and it has been a disappointment to many yes, but honestly people's expectations of Kickstarter are too high.

See, classic Rare was used to luxury, under the big N they had all the time in the world, plus Nintendo money and resources to make their past games brilliant, the budget constraints of a Kickstarter do not provide a company like this the resources they actually need to make something of this level.

When you step back and look at Yooka-Laylee for what it is: Rare-on-a-tight-budget, you can see they did a damn good job with what they had to work with. The audio-visuals are great, the dialogue is pure British cheekiness and anyone complaining about the movement and camera controls clearly has nostalgia goggles on, because 99% of 3D platformers from the classic era all had it far worse.

It is a good game, not a great one, but that's ok.

I don't know about the game, I do know that is one game where the Manual is sold as dlc however. Would avoid myself.

Here is the 1st 15 minutes of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N243EYTkJZU

No you can play with normal KB and Mouse controls but they are Damn slippery Imagine banjo with a jetpack up his rear end and you don't instantly stop when using KB mouse there is like a 3 second delay in stopping for some demented reason!

the characters felt like they were slingshotting across the map for some weird reason?!?

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I am so tired today, Might fire up yooka.

Personally I couldn't relate to all the criticism. After skimming a few negative reviews, I didn't expect Yooka-Laylee to be fun, but it turned out I really like it. To me it's exactly what you'd think it would be. No re-invention of the wheel, but a very nice and competent open world collectathon platformer similar to the old console games, and seeing that there isn't really an abundance of these on PC, I think it's sad that it's met with such disdain. In my eyes, the only thing that could be held against it is the high price. I like the game a lot, but even if I had known beforehand that I would, I'd never have paid full price for it. Maybe half of that. And the gameplay doesn't change that much over the five different worlds, but there's still quite a bit of variety in the challenges and surroundings, and it's an open world collectathon after all, so I didn't really expect it to evolve a lot. It didn't dampen my enjoyment of it at all.

Incidentally, I've also played a lot of POI and a bit of A Hat in Time lately, and while I liked POI just as much as Yooka-Laylee, I still have to warm up to A Hat in Time, which is praised by many as the better choice between it and Yooka-Laylee. So it seems to me that it's very much a matter of personal preferences.

TL:DR
It's definitely NOT a bad game, I guess people just expected something different than it is, for some reason, something innovative and outstanding, when it's just by the books (but good). And that Jontron controversy might have added to the hate, but that had nothing to do with the game, just politics surrounding the devs. And his voice isn't really missed either as all voice-acting is just gibberish anyway.

(Disclaimer: I played all of the above with a gamepad, naturally. Controls seemed alright to me.)

Play Earthworm Jim 3D instead .

Press jump if you really want to play