Yooka-Laylee is clearly a spiritual successor but also clearly not as good as Banjo Kazooie. In many aspects it’s just slightly worse: There’s less personality, clunkier movement, less good music, the humour is less funny. Perhaps the largest downgrades are the collectibles placement and the world size. The positioning of collectibles is not so much beckoning you towards exploration and platforming challenges, as it was in BK, but instead it’s just putting things in arbitrary places. The world size is a downgrade in the sense that the worlds are larger, yes, MUCH larger, but also more empty and it simply means you spend more time holding forward on the stick waiting for the next bit of gameplay. Banjo Kazooie beats the other 3D platformers by this team because it’s comparatively fast-paced (not as in adrenaline but as in giving you lots of new things to do every minute and has very little backtracking), and it has the strongest music, theming and humour. As an N64 game, the controller had four directional buttons and most modern takes map these to an analogue stick which works very badly, but that’s not the game’s fault. I bought a controller for emulating N64 games that has enough buttons to avoid this. Yooka-Laylee wins on graphics. If anyone prefers YL to BK I’d love to hear why you feel that way.