Yooka-Laylee's 5th Anniversary Highlights The Demand for Classic Platformers

gamerant.com:

Five years ago today, Yooka-Laylee was released on PC, PS4, and Xbox One platforms, with a Switch release coming later that year. It seems safe to say that, in the past five years, there hasn’t been another quite like it. That’s not to say that there haven’t been platformers, as the genre has produced many more modernized games like It Takes Two and Psychonauts 2 in recent years.

None of them capture that same “classic” feel, nor was that their purpose. “Classic” platformers are a thing for a variety of reasons, but Yooka-Laylee tried to capture that lightning in a bottle again when it came out. Comparatively, evenKirby and The Forgotten Landfeels like a modern take on a classic, which is perfectly fine, but these classics aren’t made because of age—but how it feels to step into these characters’ shoes.

7 Beginner Tips for Yooka Laylee and The Impossible Lair

Yooka-Laylee has been said to be a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie, but it’s more than that. Yooka-Laylee followed in the path of Banjo-Kazooie, Jak and Daxter (Precursor Legacy), Crash Bandicoot, Gex, Spyro, Sly Cooper, and more. Many of these games, though not all, have not had a sequel in years, despite there being a large demand for them. Yooka-Laylee tried to fill that demand with a fresh character, and while perhaps it didn’t work for everybody, it shows how important these classic platformers are.

Yooka-Laylee had a mixed reception, but part of that was a question of if a new game could be a “classic” platformer. It’s a question worth asking. Some felt that it was trying to simply rake in nostalgia, while others weren’t sure about the approach in a “modern” era. Platform games have generally moved on to bigger and more modern conceits than what simply