Playtonic Games is a studio comprised of seven Banjo-Kazooie veterans and the masterminds of the recently launched '90s-style platformer throwback Yooka-Laylee. In 2015, the team launched a Kickstarter for the latter—asking for £175,000 which it ascertained in just a few hours. By the end of the campaign it'd accrued well over £2 million. 

It's a popular game, then, which is why we invited the Playtonic team to this year's PC Gamer Weekender to talk us through the cutesy platformer's development, how it plans to emulate the greats of yesteryear, and how it stands apart as it brings the retro platforming genre into the modern age.

Live from the Gamer Stage, here's Playtonic Games:

Yooka-Laylee, aka the menacingly chirpy 3D platformer inspired by the menacingly chirpy Banjo-Kazooie, is scheduled to release on April 11. Reviews went live yesterday and, as Tom Marks wrote in his, it's far from a perfect video game. It's plagued with a number of issues reminiscent of the Nintendo 64-era, including a moody, uncooperative camera. But it looks like at least a few issues related to the camera will be patched before it releases.

That's according to patch notes (via Eurogamer) released earlier today. While it doesn't look like the camera issues are being fixed across the board, they are being addressed in some specific areas.

Here are the notes: 

• [Fixed] Camera will become locked in place after completing Gravity Room challenge in Galleon
• [Fixed] Grappling the seeds as they break in Planker's challenge causes erratic behaviour in Moodymaze Marsh
• [Fixed] Game softlocks and has to be reset if the player leaves the course and faints during the Nimble race in Tribalstack Tropics
• [Fixed] Softlock will sometimes occur on the Hub C slide if the player faints at the same moment as the timer reaching zero
• [Fixed] If the player leaves Brreeeze Block's room in the Icymetric Palace in Glitterglaze Glacier but remains in the world and returns to the same room then the isometric camera will be deactivated
• [Fixed] If player is killed by a bizzy in hub B and knocked back into the archive door at the exact same time, the screen will still transition. When the player respawns, they will be unable to move
• Performance improvements to various camera transitions in the introductory cut scene
• Performance improvements to Shipwreck Creek and Hivory Towers. Various areas have been improved including camera movement
• Performance improvements when using the light beam in the Icymetric Palace within Glitterglaze Glacier
• Performance improvements during the House of Cards ball roll course in Capital Cashino
• Performance improvements in the Bee-Bop arcade game

The patch is scheduled to roll out at some point before the game's release next week, so you shouldn't even notice it unless you backed the game on Kickstarter and manage to get it early.

The hardest enemy I had to fight in Yooka-Laylee was its camera. The hordes of minions sent by evil corporate book-napper Capital B were easily killed and often ignored, but wrestling the third-person camera into submission was like trying to get an actual bat to ride on the head of an actual iguana. Guiding Yooka the iguana and Laylee the bat on a quest to collect magical Pagies and get their book back from Capital B brought both a welcoming sense of nostalgia along with all the familiar flaws of N64-era 3D platformers. 

Yooka-Laylee is a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie made by much of the same team, and developer Playtonic Games has shamelessly copied from the Banjo playbook all throughout this revival. The game has the same cheeky dialogue and garbled character voices, the same collectibles to gather in each level, and pretty much the same exact moveset for your interspecies duo—all with a fresh new skin stretched over the top. But Yooka-Laylee also brings back the same terrible camera and dull combat, and aspects of what made Banjo-Kazooie so revolutionary in 1998 don't necessarily hold up two decades later.

One part that definitely did hold up, however, is the jump. As simple as it is, a platformer's jump can make or break the entire game. Here, Yooka-Laylee feels exactly right. Key components like high-jumping from a crouch or double-jumping into a glide feel natural and make walking around any of the game's five main worlds (plus a hub world connecting them all) smooth and satisfying. Missing jumps or falling off ledges, for the most part, felt like my fault—which is a victory not to be understated.

This may look like a staged screenshot, but it's actually just one of the horrible camera angles going uphill in a closed hallway can cause.

By contrast, Yooka-Laylee's wider selection of movement systems rarely reach the same standard. There are unique transformations in each world, and most of them are a mess to control. The snowplow transformation on Glitterglaze Glacier nearly had me rage-quitting as I unpredictably drove off cliffs—I slowly learned that the plow can't reverse, and pressing back actually moves you forward in a wide turn. A later move that let's Yooka grab onto Laylee's legs and fly for an extended period of time was nearly impossible to control accurately if I wasn't moving in a straight line, and glitched out visually if I went too high.

Camera-camera-chameleon

These issues are exacerbated by the aforementioned very bad camera. It wasn't uncommon for the camera to pull in uncomfortably close (and usually aim straight down at the floor) anytime I got just a little too close to a wall or a corridor was a bit too tight, which is the sort of nostalgia I could have done without. If Playtonic is trying to perfectly recreate an N64 game, then the awful camera angles are certainly part of that legacy.

Another example of a 90s holdover is Yooka-Laylee's lackluster combat. It's not terrible, it's just pointless. There are two main types of enemies you'll be fighting: a pair of bouncing eyeballs that attach themselves to nearby objects, and a generic minion that changes appearance in each world but only ever takes one hit to kill—or two, if it's wearing a hat. I could literally walk past the vast majority of them, but occasionally a few would get in the way and become a chore to clean-up with a basic spin attack, respawning liberally to make my efforts even more pointless. No attempt has been made to make combat interesting, and Laylee even says as much in a moment toward the end of the game.

Laylee says what I'm thinking so often it's sort of unsettling.

But these legacy issues aren't the only problems. Yooka-Laylee's biggest failing comes in its level design: the five worlds feel hollow, lacking soul, despite some cute themes. Each is an open sandbox with a smattering of Pagie-rewarding challenges to complete or puzzles to solve. The game's Steam page refers to them as playgrounds, which I think is a better name than 'world,' because they don't feel fleshed out enough to be chunks of some real place.

Yooka-Laylee also has a variety problem, often reusing tweaked versions of challenges and characters even if they have no relevance to the theme, ensuring the worlds don't have unique identities of their own. There are multiple giant golf courses, lots of inexplicably floating minecart courses, and so many mind-numbing, god-awful quiz segments that even Laylee got sick of that shit. I was sick of it after a single quiz. And none of the quirky characters you meet feel like they have a place in the world. They're just sprinkled around the map like Pagies—you won't find Mumbo's Hut built as part of the landscape, for example.

The Capital Cashino world arguably has the strongest voice of its own, taking place in a giant casino full of games and gambling. Instead of Pagies, you get tokens that you can turn in for Pagies, ten-for-one. I was hopeful entering Capital Cashino that it would be a more thoughtful level, but tokens were earned almost entirely through tiny and unsatisfying minigames like Pachinko and slot machines. There are at least half a dozen nearly identical slot machines scattered around the world, which felt more like filler than soul.

The themes of the worlds are genuinely lovely, though, lush with detail and each one very different than the others. Yooka-Laylee is a beautiful looking game when played on its highest setting, and I love that the UI is hidden whenever it's not needed. The bright colors and varied environments really shine, and are supported by some fantastic character design, even if they don't fit into those worlds. The music from veteran Rare composers Grant Kirkhope and David Wise is some of the best I've heard in a long while, and may even outshine Banjo-Kazooie's at times.

On the performance side, Yooka-Laylee ran at a solid 60 fps on my GTX 970 while at max settings. The options you can adjust are very limited, but thankfully I ran into essentially no performance issues while I played. While it's definitely meant to be played with a gamepad, it controls well enough with a mouse and keyboard if you prefer—though the camera is even more unwieldy that way. A slight annoyance is that some button prompts will still be shown as 'A' and 'B' buttons no matter your control scheme.

Playground bully

Yooka-Laylee looks and sounds like the modern 3D platformer the I've been dreaming of for a while. It's just that the actual things to do in each world don't feel quite as inspired. I really did like many of the jungle-gyms I was given to hop around, and some of Yooka-Laylee's more fun Pagies to earn were timed jumping courses which required real dexterity. But they were usually self-contained little loops that always ended where they began, meaning I rarely ever platformed to progress through a level, just to get my prize and move on to the next one. There's a lot of walking between things to do.

The more I explored each of Yooka-Laylee's worlds, the more they felt like a first pass instead of a final product. They all reminded me of the Toybox demo world initially sent out to Kickstarter backers, with different features and challenges plopped around to easily show off rather than be part of some coherent fiction. I frequently found nooks and crannies in walls that could have held secrets, but instead were just the result of boundary geometry not quite meeting up properly. While the contents of these worlds felt refined, the worlds themselves were nothing more than shells, and I doubt I'll remember any of them fondly like I do Treasure Trove Cove from Banjo or Dire Dire Docks from Super Mario 64. 

Yooka-Laylee is frustrating because it has genuine touches of greatness. It has a phenomenal soundtrack, cheeky and clever dialogue, and tight fundamental platforming that would stand tall amongst its inspirations. But all of that is muddled by soulless level design that's OK at its best and a swath of frustrating or repetitive extras. It took me 12 hours to beat the game, but that's without getting all 145 Pagies available. I could probably spend another 5-10 hours finishing off everything there is to do, but frankly Yooka-Laylee just didn't make me want to.

Playtonic did a fine enough job of recreating the nostalgia of playing Banjo-Kazooie, but Yooka-Laylee simultaneously revives all the bad parts of those games while never quite living up to the good parts. As a spiritual successor, it stands nicely as an homage that didn't quite hit all of its marks. But as a game on its own, removed from the context of its roots, Yooka-Laylee is an alright 3D platformer that unfortunately doesn't make a strong case for the revival of a genre I love. 

If you could stick a second joystick onto the Nintendo 64 controller and cram an Nvidia GTX 1060 into that old console, you'd more or less be able to play Yooka-Laylee on it. Playtonic's new 3D platformer is a pretty enough game to live in 2017, with a fun pair of heroes who jump with aplomb and have a lot of goodwill propelling them because, really, they don't make 'em like they used to. But Playtonic wasn't kidding when it pitched a game like Banjo Kazooie, which many of the creative leads worked on at Rare in the early 2000s. The jokes, the talking heads, the minigames, the user interface, the world all feel rooted in that era of gaming. That's as good and bad as it sounds.

Unlike an N64 game, Yooka-Laylee runs at smooth 60 frames per second, and kept up that performance even when I ran video capture on a GTX 980M laptop. Playtonic has found a nice colorful art style: characters look vaguely like plastic toys or claymation figures, and the world feels like what I'd imagine an N64 game would look like a decade and then some later. 

Much like the 3D platformers they used to make, Yooka-Laylee is filled with all types of collectibles. Pagies are googly-eyed scraps of magic books that let you unlock and enter different game worlds. Quills are feathers that are scattered around each world, to the tune of 200 per. There are sometimes scraps of pagies that you have to scavenger hunt for, putting them together to form a full pagie.

There's a story, but it's so barely-there there's no reason to pay attention to it. Characters make constant grunts and warbles as their dialogue s l o w l y rolls across the screen, and it's so annoying that I soon wanted to mash my way through dialogue as quickly as possible. This is the real story: you control a chameleon, and a bat, and you're going to collect a bunch of shit.

While you're collecting things, little monsters charge at you with toothy grins. They're cute but not interesting to fight, and easily ignored. Combat is as simple as pressing a button to do a Mario-style spin attack into enemies. One bit I love, though: after you've killed a few, the survivors will sometimes throw their hands in the air and run away.

I definitely haven't seen this many puns or googly eyes in a game since Banjo Kazooie, and they're very nice and very silly but never quite have the freshness to be genuinely funny. Trowzer is a snake who sells you new skills. Trouser snake, get it? Ha!

Yooka-Laylee settles into this playful silliness, never really making me laugh, but at least making me grin a little bit as I run into new characters, like Sir Scofffsalot and the Knights of Hamalot. "I bet you have a weight-related name," jokes Laylee. Does admitting you're about to tell an obvious joke make it funnier? Rare's trademark meta jokes are still here, too, with one early line about how they blew the Kickstarter money on boss fights. 

The more nostalgic you are for old Rare games, the more you'll enjoy these jokes and the general atmosphere of Yooka-Laylee. I'm happier about the big picture than the specifics: Mascot platformers are good for the heart, and Yooka-Laylee does well with its fundamentals. Jumping and moving feel good off the bat, and you're quickly given the ability to smack enemies with a Mario-style spin attack and to curl into a ball for a high-speed roll that can get you up hills.

Navigating the world feels nice enough because the basic character movement is responsive and expressively animated and the camera (controlled with the right stick on a gamepad) stays out of your way. 

But the world also feels a bit, well, basic, at least in the first two worlds I dipped into. There are fun characters to run into (there's a race-an-NPC minigame, Rare fans will be happy to know), a few scatterings of basic enemies. Light platforming challenges dotted around the world. Simple puzzles. But when I think back to playing Mario Galaxy, I remember a sublime joy in getting from one place to another with Mario's acrobatic moveset. Long jumping across dangerous gaps. Triple jumping just to feel the satisfaction of that press-press-press button rhythm. Wall jumping instead of riding an easier platform. I miss that stuff here.

Mario's moves gave emptier spaces reason to exist, because I could make my own fun in them. Without that acrobatic moveset—at least at the start—bouncing around in Yooka-Laylee is a milder pleasure. It doesn't excel.

After buying a few abilities from Trowzer, I started to get a taste for how a more complex moveset could make Yooka-Laylee's environments more interesting. I picked up an ability that let Laylee emit a sonic screech, which reveals some invisible platforms and momentarily stuns enemies. In the second world, Glitterglaze Glacier, I grabbed a skill that let Yooka absorb the properties of certain objects in the environment, which changes her body. Honey makes you sticky and able to climb slippery slopes. Bowling balls make you heavy and let you barrel through enemies while rolling along. 

I hope later worlds throw more platforming challenges at you that require a combination of these skills, along with jumping and rolling, to get from place to place. In Glitterglaze Glacier and Tribalstack Tropics, I only used them in brief bursts to grab Pagies. Hopefully later worlds also diverge from the basic jungle/ice/lava template we've seen in so many platformers. And maybe Yooka's full arsenal of chameleon powers and abilities purchased from Trowzer make for a huge, exciting moveset that need to be combined in interesting ways. It's certainly a possibility—in addition to unlocking new worlds, pagies also expand worlds, adding new areas and things to find within them. That could make all the difference.

I hope all that's the case, because Yooka-Laylee's first two hours are just a bit too familiar: mildly fun, like visiting your old stomping ground, and the new decor is a nice touch. You'll have a fine time, but you'll mostly spend that time reminiscing about all those past visits.