Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair

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Summary

Yooka and Laylee are back for a brand new adventure! Get ready for the ultimate challenge - the Impossible Lair!

Capital B has created a Hivemind device and used it to enslave the toughest bees in the Royal Stingdom - the Royal Beettalion Guard!

Liberate them from chapters filled with only the tastiest 2D platforming trimmings, and take on a 3D overworld that contains a wealth of puzzles, secrets and some familiar faces!


Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair Activation Instructions

Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair Reviews & Ratings

100
Review by TSNintendogamer [user]
April 28, 2022

Ok, this is game of the year 2019 for me. It's so great it truly is the revival of rare. I love the level design both in the levels and inOk, this is game of the year 2019 for me. It's so great it truly is the revival of rare. I love the level design both in the levels and in the overworld. The game is pretty hard even if you do beat all the levels to get the bees. I love the jokes the game makes too. The music is great and it honestly has the best overworld ever because to get to a level, you have to solve puzzles... genius.

90
Review by Cubed3
January 21, 2022

A love letter to the Donkey Kong Country series, Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair goes beyond a standard homage, and crafts something beautiful of its own. Fantastic challenging platforming, spanning across 40 imaginative levels, and a charming graphical art style. This is an essential 2D platformer that should not be missed, even more so by the fact that it is being sold for budget point.

80
Review by 2bitplayss [user]
May 20, 2021

really solid platformer kinda like donkey kong tropical freeze.. the level design is really good and i love that the level changes for examplereally solid platformer kinda like donkey kong tropical freeze.. the level design is really good and i love that the level changes for example a level with windmils and platforms then you do somthing on the overworld and now in th elevel there is a storm. stuff like that is great. and the 3d overworld has many fun puzzles. the backrounds also look good and that is important its mutch more enjoyable to look at like look at new super mario bros. the art style is so generic there is nothing going on there. here on the other hand.... anyway great game

100
Review by TitaniumDragon [user]
May 17, 2021

Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Maze is a 2D platformer that is strongly reminiscent of Donkey Kong Country mechanically. While a sequel toYooka-Laylee and the Impossible Maze is a 2D platformer that is strongly reminiscent of Donkey Kong Country mechanically. While a sequel to the 3D platformer Yooka-Laylee, this is a very different fish in terms of gameplay and is much better than its predecessor.You play as Yooka, a lizard with a bat named Laylee riding around on his head. Much like the new Donkey Kong Country games, the bat is both an extra hit point as well as someone who gives you more powers - while you have Laylee on your head, you can do an aerial twirl that keeps you in the air longer and gives you songs lateral movement, as well as a stronger, longer ground roll. Yooka can roll on the ground, jump, hit things with his tail, and even pick up some items with his tongue. There are also some water sections, where you swim around and can dash for a little boost of underwater speed. There are vines and nets you can climb and, in a few levels, barrels that launch you through the air - just in case you forgot what game this was borrowing from.One important difference from Donke Kong Country is that being hit doesn't just take away your partner - instead she takes off from your head and flaps around squeaking erratically in the air, similar to baby Mario in Yoshi's Island. If you touch her again before she flies off, she will land on your head again and you will have effectively healed. In addition, there are bells in each level that call her back if you lost her, and if you die, you will restart at the last checkpoint with her on your head.The game itself has two main components- a 3D isometric overworld, and the main game, the 2D levels. The 3D overworld is all about exploration- you can't jump very high, but there are no significant dangers there either. Instead, you go around completing various puzzles to unlock the levels and find collectible tonics - items that can be paid for in quills (the game's coin or banana equivalent) and then used in levels. These can visually alter the gameplay, but can also empower Yooka and Laylee, making them faster, giving them super attacks, or allowing them to find secrets. Alternatively, they can make the gameplay harder and give you bonus quills as a reward. Most of the bonus tonics negatively impact the quills you get, which is a bit of a downer - I mostly just used the tonics that gave some benefits at no cost, but in retrospect it might have been better to use some of the other ones.However, that is an open question, as the game is not very difficult to begin with.The 2D levels are similar to Donkey Kong Country in that a lot of levels try to do their own thing. While its gimmicks aren't as diverse as those of DKC mechanically, visually the game has a great deal of variety. Each of the 20 levels in the game is actually a double level - performing some task in the overworld, like flooding the level with water or freezing it with an ice bomb, will cause the level to change aspects. These are not minor changes but lead to very different gameplay, routing, and challenges.The game is fairly generous with its checkpoints, and none of the main levels have especially difficult platforming. As a result, a lot of your deaths are likely to occur due to exploration rather than difficulty, as you go back and forth over the levels to find the secrets they hold.Each level contains quills - similar to coins in Mario or bananas in DKC, these are all over the place and guide you through levels. But the real secrets are hidden coins - 5 per level - which are used to unlock overworld progress and access new levels. These can be hidden off behind seemingly solid walls, be off the far side of the beaten track, be easy to see but difficult to reach, or require you to complete some task to find them. Such tasks are almost always either to complete a quill challenge, where you must pick up all the quills dropped by a quill with a face or catch up to one before it disappears, or else bringing a special explosive item to blow up marked cages.These coins encourage exploration of the 2D levels, and it generally takes 15-20 minutes to completely clear each of the game's 40 stages.In addition, there are a number of one off "challenge" levels that you get in the overworld. Generally you have 2 hp in each and must kill all the enemies in them. These are single screen challenges and often take 30 seconds or less to complete; like the coins, these, too, unlock parts of the overworld.Your ultimate goal is to collect 48 beetallion (yes, the game is bee themed and loves it's bad bee puns) members- one for beating each stage, plus eight you get on the overworld either via exploration or secret exits within the 2D stages - and get through the titular Impossible Maze, which is quite possible at that point - though still hard enough to be a challenge.All in all, it's an 80/100 game. Sure, it might be derivative, but it is derived from some pretty good games.

50
Review by BlueReview [user]
February 1, 2021

The core of this game as a platformer is great and most of the overworld stuff really enhances the experience that brings back some greatThe core of this game as a platformer is great and most of the overworld stuff really enhances the experience that brings back some great nostalgia from older SNES platformer games with hub worlds. Unfortunately though, there's a lot of major issues with the hit boxes in this game. I believe a lot of the hitbox problems are built around the reliance on creating tonics as collectibles, having to balance a game around a collection of Tonics that increase speed and rolling and enemy health seems lacking as parts of the games can feel broken with certain tonics on or off. Early on in the game, I put a tonic on that made enemies take 2 hits which made some future collectibles nearly impossible to collect, doubly so when 75% of the games hitboxes feel off. The overworld gimmicks are awesome but the fact that every level has one felt like it took away some of that special feeling of finding them. I believe the game would have benefited from more unique levels and making the alternate levels more scarce especially when you sometimes feel like you are spending more time on the overworld than in actual levels. A lot of this is nitpicky but in the long run, that is because I really like the basic aspect of the game but the little things here and there add up but ultimately this game would be a solid 8/10 if the hitboxes and occassional jump momentum shifts didn't feel off so frequently.

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Game Information
Release Date October 7, 2019
Publisher Team17, Playtonic Games
Content Rated E (Everyone)
Game Modes Single player
Player Perspectives Third person, Bird view / Isometric, Side view
Genres Platform, Adventure, Indie
Themes Action
Platforms PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch