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Then there are the quills, which are used to buy any of the tonics you find lying around the overworld. coins, of which there are five hidden in each stage and are needed to pay off Trowzer the snake, who’s erected literal paywalls in the game's overworld and requires some coinage before he’ll take them down (cue some jokes in the consistently brilliant dialogue about how paywalls are a disgrace). (Look, shush.) Regardless, the elite may turn their nose up as such optional help, but the reality is that those who tough it out and don’t skip anything will naturally collect more items along the way. We’re obviously too awesome at games to have discovered this for ourselves. You’ll also be asked if you want to skip a section if you die a particularly large number of times in one area.

You will absolutely die a lot during this game, but unlike in the Donkey Kong Country titles, you have infinite lives here. It’s got just the right level of difficulty too: which is to say, it’s high but manageable. All Speech Subtitled (Or No Speech In Game).Add in some of the amusing trademark vocal effects – all generated by the Playtonic team, of course – and there can be no doubt that you’re playing, seeing and hearing a premium product here. Almost every single track is a winner (our particular favourite is the 'frozen' version of Frantic Fountains) and it's amazing to hear how themes change when level states are altered (more on that in a moment). The music is equally brilliant, thanks to contributions of ex-Rare composers David Wise and Grant Kirkhope, who aid the core Playtonic audio team of Dan Murdoch and Matt Griffin with some career-best music. This is a gorgeous platformer, with brilliant character animation and beautiful backgrounds, all running at a smooth 60 frames per second.

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Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair also carries over two more of the major elements that make the Donkey Kong Country series so notable: the look and sound. If you want to dash through a stage you can – and your skills will still be tested sufficiently – but to find every last collectable item, you're going to need to hone those skills to their maximum potency it's no exaggeration to describe this as one of the most finely-tuned 2D platformers we've ever played. Stage design is meticulous, with challenge after challenge neatly linking together alongside various hidden pathways (and occasional Super Mario World-style secret exit) which are just begging to be explored on a second run. Even the way you can gain a little distance off a jump by rolling off a ledge before jumping is captured here perfectly. When you grab a swinging vine they tilt in exactly the same way, which is a very niche thing to point out, we know, but if you know the Donkey Kong Country games you’ll know exactly what we mean when you do it.

There are plenty of suspiciously barrel-like structures that fire you out at great speeds when you jump into them. Yooka can roll into a ball and plough through enemies (with Laylee riding on top to keep the roll going), just like Donkey Kong could. So much of the action feels like a perfectly natural evolution of the Donkey Kong Country mechanics. Many of them worked on a little-known game called Donkey Kong Country, you see, and there can be very little doubt that Rare’s SNES masterpiece is the main influence this time around. Having already delivered a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie with the first game, the team at Playtonic has shifted its focus to the 2D platforming world. Similarly, the self-appointed ‘hardcore’ will be able to put their honey (ahem) where their mouth is by entering the Lair with a smaller number of bees rescued, to see if they can beat it with less room for error.Īll these bee-wrangling shenanigans would be for nought if the game itself was a buzzkill, but thankfully that isn’t the case. Those less confident in their own abilities will want to collect as many bees as possible before taking on the Lair: after all, when you can afford to take up to 48 hits before you die, that’s a massive help in a very difficult stage. This is a clever way of letting the player decide how hard their final challenge should be. There are 48 of these bees in total, and each one you rescue will let you take an extra hit in the Impossible Lair without dying.

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The problem is, at the start of the game all the bees are imprisoned in little cocoons – most of which are located near the end of the game’s stages – so you have to beat each level and free them before they can be added to your beettallion. This preparation comes in the form of your ‘beettallion’, an army of fearless soldier bees whose sole purpose is to protect you in the Impossible Lair.

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