Parents' Guide to Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair

While it's clever and challenging, a lack of originality keeps this from being a classic. Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair is a 2D side-scrolling platformer in the vein of the Donkey Kong Country series and the Crash Bandicoot games. In it, a lizard called Yooka and his purple bat best friend Laylee have to save the world from Capital B, who wants to use his Hive Mind device to enslave all the bees. Though to do this, Yooka and Laylee are going to need some help, which they'll get by rescuing some bees who are trapped in obstacle course-like areas that are fiendish with the traps and hazards scattered across each location. It's a good thing our heroes are good at running, jumping, bopping enemies on the head by jumping on them, and doing forward rolls that knock enemies and less sturdy objects out of the way.

While this game clearly owes a lot of debt to the earlier released platforming games, it's oddly fans of those titles who will get bored of this quickest. While some levels are clever, and challenging, Yooka and Laylee don't do anything here we haven't done before (though, admittedly, not always in the same game). Laylee can help Yooka do a short hover move like Donkey Kong Country's Dixie Kong to get over obstacles, while Yooka's forward roll takes out wooden boxes in the same way as Crash Bandicoot's patented spin cycle. Even though veterans of similar games will feel this loses steam after a while, people who've never played those games, or not played them recently, will have fun rolling through Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair.