Yooka-Laylee: 6 Big Reasons To Be Very Excited

Key gameplay mechanics in the previous Banjo games revolved around the unique abilities Banjo and Kazooie possessed in order to get through environment hazards and solve puzzles. 

Most of these attacks were just an excuse for Banjo to inexplicably throttle Kazooie; giving her neck trauma from a head-first ground-pound and shoving eggs down her throat so she can vomit them back out at enemies. As you do.

With new characters comes new move sets and new gameplay mechanics, and the potential for weirdness is high with the pairing of a chameleon and a bat. Creative lead and designer Gavin Price states in the KickStarter video:

“We settled on the chameleon and the bat because we just love the kind of natural abilities that that would bring to the gameplay, and then we thought about the different combinations and the way they’d work with each other, it just gives us lots of compound effects.”

Immediately the mind conjures up images of stealth gameplay with Yookas natural ability to camouflage. Of course we’ll see obvious stuff like double jumps and Laylee’s ability to fly or glide to keep the platforming as accessible and enjoyable as the platforming in the Banjo games. We can all hope that we’ll be seeing some sort of flying sonar-based insect-eating tech getting implemented upside-down in caves (or possibly right-side-up in jungles).