Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair

Yooka-Laylee and The Impossible Lair: A New Dimension

Yooka-Laylee is a game that is remembered as an example of bad Kickstarter stories and why we should scale back our enthusiasm and expectations for crowdfunded games. Marketed, financed, and sold as a spiritual successor to collectible 3D platformers like Banjo-Kazooie, the game was met with poor reviews and frustration from most gamers. Technical issues, inaccurate controls and gameplay issues that remind you why this type of game died out in the first place rather than trying to evolve it and reintroduce it to the current generation. With the second attempt, developer Playtonic Games is taking the series into a new dimension and a new inspiration. This time Yooka-Laylee is a 2D platform game mainly inspired by the Donkey Kong Country series. How was the game released this time?

Actually wonderful. “The Impossible Lair” is undoubtedly one of the biggest surprises of the year, and it shows from the first moment. Unlike the first part, Yooka and Laylee’s controls in this game are very precise and reliable, given the toughest jumps and platforming challenges. Much like Donkey Kong Country in its modern form, your main moves are jumping, rolling, and using your partner – in this case, Laylee – to get more time in the air, and all of these moves work precisely and feel good. The difference is that after you take the first hit and lose him, Laylee will fly randomly across the screen for a short period of time during which you can catch him before he disappears. This is one of the “relief” methods The Impossible Lair uses. In addition, the life system is abolished and the player is given the opportunity to die as many times as he wants without returning him to the beginning of the phase to a system that allows the player to skip part of the phase if there is more in it as a certain number of lives die.

The Challenging Level Design

All of these choices might suggest that The Impossible Lair is a simple game, but thanks to the level design, it’s far from that. The level design takes full advantage of The Impossible Lair’s precision controls to craft a series of platforming challenges that will push you to your limits, regardless of your classification experience. The Impossible Lair’s stages are carefully designed, full of secrets hidden in very dark places, encouraging you to explore every corner of the stage. Perhaps the only problem with the game’s stages is that despite the game’s strong similarity and inspiration from Donkey Kong Country, we find that one thing that most distinguishes the stages of this series is missing, namely the variety of stage environments and narrative Sequence of the journey of the characters in it. The environments of The Impossible Lair are more repetitive and less distinctive and don’t stick in the memory as much. However, there are several key elements that differentiate this game from Donkey Kong Country and give it its particular elegance, and perhaps the first of these elements is the game’s namesake, the Impossible Lair itself.

The game begins in an impossible stage called The Impossible Lair. This stage has an exceptional level of difficulty, is extremely long and has no storage facilities. It is possible to complete this stage if you are a very experienced and professional platformer and have had dozens of attempts memorizing the stage design. However, if you are an ordinary person like most of us, then this is where the rest of the game comes into play. For each stage you complete in the game, you will receive a bee, and each bee will give you the ability to withstand another hit in the impossible cave. There are 48 bees in the game and the more you collect, the less impossible the cave becomes. I found this system to be very wonderful as it gives each player the opportunity to determine the difficulty of the final challenge in the game based on their personal assessment of their abilities. I would return every time after collecting a new number of bees to try it out. Back on stage, and every time I progressed a little the game would tell me where I had reached, 20%, 45%, 66% until I was finally able to beat it, not just because I collected more bees, but because my level improved as I played new levels and replayed the cave until I conquered it.

The Unique World Map

The second idea that sets the game apart is its world map. At first glance it looks like the Super Mario 3D World stage map where you just walk around and select the stage you want, but the Impossible Lair world map is much deeper than that and closer to the Zelda games than Mario ! It’s a map full of secrets, puzzles, keys and locks, and challenges that are no less fun than the levels themselves, and your rewards for exploring and solving their secrets are the best levels in the game. That’s because every stage in The Impossible Lair has a second version that you unlock by playing around with the game world. You can drown the book from which you enter the stage in water and the stage will sink into the water, or you can turn it upside down and the stage will tip over! These additional versions of the levels feature the most entertaining and distinctive environments, music, and platforming challenges in the entire game, even putting the first versions into embarrassing comparison.

Another thing you get from exploring the world map is Play Tonics. These are tools that you can install that change things in the game in ways that make it harder, easier, or change the way it looks. Some make your character faster, others turn the levels on their head, others make the game in black and white like a classic movie. There are dozens of tonics that change the gaming experience and encourage you to play stages over and over again with new tonics. In addition, tonics that make the game easier reduce the money that can be obtained in the levels, and tonics that make the game more difficult increase it, giving the player additional motivation to challenge themselves with difficult tonics.

In terms of appearance, the game is strangely beautiful for a game developed in Unity, and an example of the degree to which the engine has evolved in recent years, but most of the game’s presentational beauty comes in the form of its excellent music album edited by the original game’s esteemed team of composers, in addition to a prominent appearance by the wonderful David Wise. , who presented the album with 13 wonderful melodies, including the five melodies of Al-Areen Al-Impossible. The game is also rich in content, as it took me 12 hours to complete the main stages and I still have a lot of coins and tonics to collect, which gives it a special value, especially since it is sold at a cheap price of 30 US- Dollar.

A Distinctive Platform Game

With Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair, Playtonic Games has atoned for all the sins they committed in the first part and presented a game whose level is rarely found outside of Nintendo’s console games. The Impossible Lair managed to combine the inspiration of the best, present its new classification ideas and maintain its own identity, making it one of the most distinctive platform games of this generation.