I know that the year isn’t done yet, and it might be a little early to start naming games the best of the year, but for me, I’m hooked beyond belief to Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair. I adore this game, and can’t shake the feeling that it was made for people just like me: those who grew up with platformers, and want to revisit that joyous nostalgia of running and jumping on perfect level designs. I love this game completely and cannot see anything topping it.

I enjoyed my time with The Impossible Lair. Even with it’s minor issues, I still managed to keep having fun, and that’s really what it’s all about. Yooka-Laylee works much better as a 2D platformer and I hope Team 17 will continue to develop these characters in this style. This game is a great starting point for the new direction and I hope we see more sequels like this in the future.

The fun thing is, you can try to take on the Impossible Lair as many times as you like and each time you die, the game leaves a little marker indicating how far you got. My skills were most definitely not up to the challenge of beating the Impossible Lair without the Beetallion, but I sure had fun trying. I genuinely had a blast with Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair and you will too if you have any love for the genre at all. The game was pure fun.

A much more inventive and thoughtful affair than the duo's previous outing, Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair is the closest you'll get to Donkey Kong Country on PS4 and you should embrace it with the accordant warmth.

Yooka-Laylee finally succeeds in bringing the platformer to the next level. With an original structure, made of puzzle and reverse narration, this new episode brings a fresh OST and some great ideas, while being sometimes too difficult or unprecise. A really good game for nostalgics and newcommers.

Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair will sometimes shamelessly steal from other iconic platformers, but it adds enough ideas of its own to get away with it. The sequel works better in terms of gameplay and level design than the three-dimensional original.

These bugs and the small amount of content make Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair feel a bit rushed. The levels mostly all look the same, the alternate stages feel like padding, and the Impossible Lair gimmick is definitely going to be divisive for platforming fans. Its biggest issue, though, is that the platforming isn't nearly as precise as the games that inspired it. It has enough unique ideas that some platforming fans may still want to check it out after a price drop, but don't expect to be blown away.