Yooka-Laylee Toybox+ Preview

Way back in May 2015, a little Kickstarter launched for a new game made by some very familiar faces. 40 minutes later, it had reached its funding goal, and ended its 47 days on Kickstarter with just over £2 million raised. I am of course talking about Yooka-Laylee, the Rare-vival of the 3D character platformers that shaped many people's’ young gaming lives. 13 months later we’ve gotten our first look with the Toybox. I actually backed this at the very start, getting the slightly superior Toybox experience, Toybox+. The only difference, as far as I can tell, is I had access to an additional island that had endlessly spawning monsters to spin at - though more on that a little later.

The Yooka-Laylee Toybox is a standalone tech demo that shows off what we can expect when the full game launches sometime in the spring of 2017. The majority of the world is made up of colourful blocks, though some objects littered throughout seem to be assets taken straight from the game. Everything that’s clearly going to be in the full game looks great, and I personally can’t wait to see the whole world fully realised. Everything has been designed to show off the base mechanics, and since I played the whole thing straight-through, collecting every secret, I can say that they did a great job.

As you would expect with a 3D character platformer, you have to run and double-jump your way around the levels. However, as with Banjo-Kazooie, there are a few additional abilities up your non-existent sleeves. For example, while in the air you can glide a short distance by holding down the jump button, and you can swim! I mean, you could in Banjo-Kazooie but it’s so nice to be able to swim in the gorgeous water. There is also the roll, which allows you to go up certain inclined surfaces that are otherwise inaccessible, and a ground-pound which can stop you taking falling damage if you jump off the highest point of the map and run out of glide.

Laylee is justifiably happy to be playable at last

Scattered around the map are 100 Quills, which are cutesie feathers hiding wherever they can. Collecting these is the main goal of the Toybox, and collecting all of them reveals a secret for the main game - and no, I’m not going to tell you what it is. Alongside these are two rooms which are sort of hidden, which contain more material from the actual game. One has some particle effects and the other has a selection of ambient sounds for walking over different materials.

The combat is very simple, as one would expect from a 3D platformer: push X on the controller to do a spin attack. You can use the aforementioned ground-pound, but it doesn’t do a whole lot in comparison. The additional little island I had access to featured some small gremlin-looking enemies with a variety of different hats on, and they all died in one hit. It wasn’t complex, but it was satisfying.

Keeping everything in check are some security robots, which serve as the Toybox’s NPCs. Talking to these shows some of that very typical British Rare humour: from jokes about FPS drops to insinuations that pirates are killed on sight, I am hoping that there’s a little dark humour in Yooka-Laylee’s bright world.

The mix of modelled assets and blocks on show

Finally, and I know I’ve kept you waiting, the platforming: it’s almost like they never made anything else. It feels very fluid and very precise, jumping from platform to platform, gliding around and reaching areas that only a moment ago seemed impossible. Every time I missed a jump, or bounced off a ledge, it was my own fault for not being good enough. I know because I made it perfectly immediately afterwards, the muscle memory reforming after all those years of disuse. After only 30 minutes of playing, everything felt right with the world and by the end I really wish there were more.

After some recent Kickstarter concerns and flops, it’s relieving to see that Playtonic are making the game they promised back in May 2015. I gave them money for a promise of a game, one that had only just started being developed, and today I can say without a shadow of a doubt that if Yooka-Laylee comes out and is as much fun as its little tech demo is, it’s going to be high on the list for Game of the Year.