Crash Bandicoot. Super Mario 64. Banjo-Kazooie. Spyro. Fantastic videogames that all harken back to a golden age of 3D platforming, and new contender Yooka-Laylee looks all set to carry on this fine legacy.
Developer Playtonic Games set up a successful Kickstarter campaign which wrapped up last June.
Things have been fairly quiet on the Yooka-Laylee front since then, but we’ve now got a wealth of new screenshots and details to pore over.
If you haven’t heard of Yooka-Laylee before now, it’s a 3D platformer in the vein of all those games we loved growing up, but it probably takes the most inspiration from the excellent Banjo Kazooie.
The screens peppered throughout this article will probably give you a good idea of what the team at Playtonic are going for – and it’s looking pretty awesome. There’s also some early gameplay footage knocking about at the bottom of the page.
In a post on their website, Playtonic shared some new info regarding the Toybox mode. Essentially, the Toybox serves as something of a self contained demo.
Toybox mode won’t spoil anything in the final game, but will offer a taste of the colourful platforming, exploration, and collectible hunting on offer.
Said mode is only available for backers who pledged enough money (the £35 tier and up). They’ll get their hands on it in July, before the full game launches. Playtonic are aiming for their original October 2016 release window, but nothing is set in stone yet.
Still, the team remain confident that it’ll be worth the wait:
As fans of some of our past work will attest, we’re a group committed to releasing games only when they’re polished, complete, and at the quality level you expect. As soon as we’re confident we’ve ticked all of those boxes, we’ll inform our backers directly of when to mark their calendars.
It was also explained how “Quills” work (in the game, I’m sure you get what they do in real life). They’re one of the game’s many, many collectible items, which can be traded in for all kinds of cool new moves.
These moves can be unlocked in any order, so as to really give the player choice, and a little bit more freedom.
Playtonic revealed that we’ll be learning much more about the game over the next few weeks, with an E3 appearance also confirmed.
Yooka-Laylee will be coming to PlayStation 4, Wii U, Xbox One, and PC.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.