Fans of Yooka-Laylee, rejoice. Playtonic Games and publisher Team17 have announced another game for the little lizard and his buddy. It's called Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, and it'll launch sometime this year.
Unlike the first game, Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair will be a 2.5D platformer with a top-down 3D overworld. Yooka and Laylee must team up to battle Capital B and rescue Queen Phoebee's Royal Beetallion Guard across a series of challenging 2.5D levels. Clearly, this isn't the game for you if you don't like puns. You can check out a trailer for Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair below:
Appropriately enough, Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair looks pretty similar to the more recent Donkey Kong Country games. The game promises "vibrant 2D levels" and a 3D overworld "filled with puzzles and challenges". Players will use Yooka and Laylee's versatile moveset to uncover secrets and shortcuts in levels. The puzzles shown off in the trailer look to be mostly environmental: spitting fire to burn away thorns, growing plants as platforms, and destroying rocks to access new areas. The trailer also shows one of the levels having a "flooded" variant, so it looks like different versions of levels will be available.
Two of the original Yooka-Laylee composers, Grant Kirkhope and David Wise, will be returning to score this new game. Kirkhope and Wise are long-time Rare collaborators, having worked on Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong Country respectively. Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair will launch for Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC sometime this year. There will also be a boxed console version of the game.
Playtonic and Team17 are promising more info about the game during E3 week, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, you can check out what TechRaptor thought of the original Yooka-Laylee.
