I'm pretty sure everyone who loved (and still loves) the Banjo games and exploration based 3d platformers in general is going to like YL a lot. I mean camera problems are one thing, but when reviewers start complaining that there's no minimap, that some stuff is too hidden, the levels are complex or puzzles too tricky.. I just can't relate.
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Yooka-Laylee- Review Thread
- Thread starter FireSol
- Start date
I personally remember his 4/10 for Unravel and 1/10 for Homefront The Revolution. Homefront is garbage but not 1/10 garbage.
I don't care about Zelda review since I don't play Nintendo games (yet).
4/10 for Unravel was about right. The game is gorgeous to watch and has a unique concept which was well-realised visually, but in my experience became very frustrating as
soon as the more complex physics puzzles kicked in, both in how difficult it was to work out what to do next and also the physics failing to work as intended, which rendered it no fun to play - so I stopped.
I can understand the complaints.
Complexeity can be good and bad depending on the design. A lot of the reviews I've watched have stayed the latter. That the complexity is more due to obtuse than clever design.
If a level has no, or not enough landmarks to determine your progress through it, or just seems to have you wandering aimlessly hoping that you'll cover the level that way, it isn't good design.
BK had some intricate level designs but they were also memorable and very polished in their design. Maybe the Nintendo influence! I'm withholding full judgement until I see the levels for myself however.
The camera however is less forgivable in 2017, eek.
How about complaints about technical issues like game breaking bugs, bad camera and frame rate? Gamxplain flat out said the game just simply lacks polish on their review of the Xbone version.
I bet they regret going with the Unity engine now!
Altered Juice
Member
Gaf members still sweat over heated system threads. No surprises here.
That said, I will be picking up mario kart over this shit. Maybe in a few months
SuperAndroid17
Member
At least its better than Mighty No 9?
Banjo Kazooie just wasn't a very good platformer though (compared to even stuff like Rayman 2). BK was more of a collect-a-thon mixed with adventure/exploration.
FearMyWrench
Member
Will DF be doing a Yooka video? Can't decide between PC or PS4, curious how PS4 holds up. Thanks.
Camera issues in OOT? I dont remember any.I don't know, it's not really silky smooth but it gets its job done. Depends on where you are in the game, I guess? Corridors and stuff.
In the Toybox demo I had zero problems with it.
Btw, anyone who can still play games like Tooie, DK64, Jet Force Gemini or even the old N64 Zeldas (you don't remember the terrible camera, do you?) and technically enjoy them should get along just fine.
I disagree heavily but I'll leave it at that
and please stop with ''Nintendo fans'' nonsense, I have seen worse from other people.
I was super excited for this game but some of the reviews have really soured me on it. Jim's complaint that the puzzles seem obtuse, was the one that really got me. I don't want to go around the world figuring out what to do. If something's challenging I want it to be because the challenge itself is hard, not because I can't figure it out.
This may not be the game I hoped for.
This may not be the game I hoped for.
This BK review is perfect. I wanna play it again!
Leave it to Dunkey to perfectly explain why Banjo was successful and why games that try to replicate it take all the wrong steps.
No, see, I can't relate to all that at all... in my experience obtuse vs clever design is 90% in the eye of the beholder. It's just that some people are very easily overwhelmed.
Also I'm sure some reviewers were lacking something but it certainly wasn't landmarks... we've seen plenty of YL footage of the levels, they're hardly wizardry 3's wireframe dungeons are they? they're packed with stuff that can be used as landmarks.
As for 'aimless wandering': I don't get this complaint either. You're meant to explore the worlds and find what's there to find and solve what's there to be solved. And there's stuff everywhere. What else do you need to properly play the game? what would make it not aimless?
Guess will soon see for ourselves if there's a discernible drop in quality between Rare's BK and BT 's level design and YL's, but I'm betting nope.
Yeah, Unity engine is bad news usually. Hadn't read of any game breaking bugs, hope they fix that soon.
As for the other stuff (camera, framerate), that's unfortunate, but I seriously doubt it's going to be so bad in most setups. And frankly 'lacking polish' is not high on my personal list of terrible game sins.
If people are going to get excited when review scores are good for a game they're looking forward to (Horizon, BOTW etc) then they should care when they're lower than they were expecting. You can't have it both ways.
I'm not quite so sure. There's a missing element for sure here and it isn't just reviewer's failings.
By aimless I mean not being sure what the point of the exploration actually is. In BK there was a sense of purpose of the map layouts. You can disagree and we both will find for ourselves soon enough but if maps were made to feel overwhelming for the sake of it, that is not good level design.
Laughing Banana
Weeping Pickle
You have lived your entire life entirely free of wanting people to acknowledge things that you like or do?
Yeah, okay, if you say so.
DistortionOfReality
Member
Reviews aren't amazing, but I did really enjoy Banjo so I'll look forward to getting into this for a modern take on pure nostalgia. Plus knowing that I only paid £15 all those years ago makes it an easier pill to swallow
Maybe people really shouldn't care too much about metascore either way then?
Looks like that we are in front of a mediocre game. I was hyped for this but now I don't know what to think.
I will wait then until it drops the price, in the meantime I will continue playing Horizon, Danganronpa Reload, and Persona 5. There is no room for another game in my agenda right now.
I will wait then until it drops the price, in the meantime I will continue playing Horizon, Danganronpa Reload, and Persona 5. There is no room for another game in my agenda right now.
DieNgamers
Member
Agent_4Seven
Tears of Nintendo
The game is not broken, completely playable and looks like even somewhat enjoyable with all its problems, so there's no way 2/10 is the right score for it. 1 or 2 should indicate that its a complete pos game no one should buy / play and other reviewers clearly doesn't say this.
Why? Just because of one game?Didn't the same happened with no mans sky?
7/10 is a decent game, not mediocre. Mediocre is a 5/10 average.
SomedayTheFire
Member
so your scale for reviews is different to his. big whoop.
It's perfectly legitimate to get excited when a game gets great scores, because that means most pundits like it, so there's a good chance you will too, if you're into the genre.
On the other hand, it makes sense to be disappointed when a game you've been anticipating is received with lackluster scores.
Fidgeting about the difference between a 98 and a 97 is not worth the trouble. Similarly, people advocating that you should completely disregard reviews and make up your own mind despite wide-spread criticism isn't a fair proposition if that means having to take a gamble at full price.
MeisterLeder
Banned
I was thinking about getting this game, but the performanc issues that some reviews mentioned make me worried :/
I want the Xbone version.
I want the Xbone version.
SomedayTheFire
Member
or people could read the actual reviews rather than focusing on the score?
Then please tell us how a 2/10 works on any scale? Is the 1/10 completely unplayable then? or is 1/10 half unplayable and then 0/10 not playable at all? That's a sharp drop off and makes zero sense. Face it, his scale makes no sense unless he's not accounting for playability here and if he isn't, that makes no sense either.
stargateheaven
Member
A review i saw earlier mention a "performance patch" coming. Is this still true? Looks like it runs like shit in some areas..
SomedayTheFire
Member
1 - universally awful
2 - really bad
3 - has some redeeming qualities but pretty bad over all
4 - below average
etc. etc.
if a game is unplayable or broken to the point of unplayable don't give it a score ¯\_(ツ
_/¯there's one scale that uses the whole 1-10 system.
Out of every 10 games, I like 8 of them more than the games I rate 2 and below.
There is a difference between giving a personal opinion and producing a professional review of a product. The latter has to take into account many more factors including assessing the value others might gain from the product, whereas a personal opinion is entirely guided by an individual response.
I could play a game that I hate but if I might be kinder to it if I was offering a review. Similarly there might be a game that I love but if I were to review it I have to mark it down for reasons which may not bother me personally. There is an element of trying to achieve some objectivity.
I could play a game that I hate but if I might be kinder to it if I was offering a review. Similarly there might be a game that I love but if I were to review it I have to mark it down for reasons which may not bother me personally. There is an element of trying to achieve some objectivity.
SomedayTheFire
Member
nah. reviews are subjective. press releases are objective.
Of course! I look at both when I'm weighing my decision. But in my experience the score aggregate is often a decent way to gauge consensus. I don't believe that there's something inherently wrong with scoring games.
Case in point: I love the old Rare platformers. I was cautiously optimistic about Yooka Laylee, but the general reception made me very skeptical. Reading some reviews talking about the camera issues and frame drops, I decided to hold off until at the very least patchable issues are fixed.
Your personal opinion is the value others may gain from the product... unless you assume you're the only person in existence to have a unique taste, and everyone else will uniformly agree that game X is really a 9/10.
If the game is really that good, then the other reviews will likely swing the average in that direction... it doesn't need you to present a view that's not honest of how you actually found the game.
I disagree - it's inbetween - I hated a recent popular sci-fi movie, it was zero for me. But if I reviewed it formally for a magazine or website, I'd give it an average score as a concession that it is well-made, intelligent and others will enjoy it. I'd just make sure my issues were well-explained in the text.
I'd save my low scores for the films with no redeemable qualities.
And I totally disagree with that. I want to hear a well written opinion on a game, not what someone thought a hypothetical person may or may not enjoy.
1 - universally awful
2 - really bad
3 - has some redeeming qualities but pretty bad over all
4 - below average
etc. etc.
if a game is unplayable or broken to the point of unplayable don't give it a score ¯\_(ツ
there's one scale that uses the whole 1-10 system.
But reviewers already take off points for how functional a game is. Frame rate issues, etc. If they didn't take off for glitches, or that, sure that rating system would work. At this point, it's already a part of the system so you have to include a section of the score that is completely unplayable in large chunks (probably 0-2.5 or 3 makes the most sense on a 10 scale), and then 4, 5, 6 being average ish and then 8, 9, 10 being varying degrees of great. Keep in mind that even this scale doesn't work for large chunks of time since it would only be average relative to the games out now and would be irrelevant in 10 years or whatever, but that problem seems like an impossible hurdle to overcome.
Anyways, my point is that he (and other reviewers) decide to take off points for miniscule things and then decide to still rate games really bad if they just don't like it, regardless of functionality which just makes no sense. Now, again, if he didn't take points off at all for camera, fps, etc issues, then he is consistent at least with himself, but I'm not a fan of that at all.
That's a list
SomedayTheFire
Member
like to be fair, I think scores should be completely done away with, they ruin reviews. but if I was reviewing and when i was reviewing I'd mention those things, sure. but since my reviews were tied to a score, I scored what I thought about them, not what someone else might think about them. if we do that in reviews, they tend to end up homogenised and worthless.
and as I said, his scale is different. he's not reviewing the game to the same scale as the person from Polygon, or IGN. Either way, a review is his own subjective thought on the game. different people are affected by different things, for example if the framerate of game X is really bad but the rest of the game is really good, I would be nicer on that than game Y where the level design is bad but the framerate is a locked 60. like each and every person that scores a game has a different scale, there is no one size fits all thing for review score and basing it off american grading system seems to be the worst overall because that skews the scale.
if I was locked to a number system, I would use the one I posted above and if a game was unplayable it doesn't deserve a score. unplayable = unreviewable.
No, it'd be a list if you listed all my reviews and scores. Which would also happen with any scale.
You are right, I've seen some mediocre reviews in the list, and stayed with the bad ones instead of the good ones. I have exaggerated here.
Now that I think about time, there are many platform games with scores between 6 and 7 that I liked. This one should be enjoyable for me too.
But hypothetically speaking what if you are asked to review a genre you don't like? You can't give the latest sports game a 1/10 because you hate football.
But yes you are probably right about scores - I like how Edge does it in theory, though find myself strongly disagreeing with them regularly when I don't feel the score correlates to either my experience of the game or their own scoring system.
I think that's the main issue here. You have completely different people with completely different scales on an aggregate site like metacritic. What sense does it make to have an aggregate score with different scales? Also, people want objective (believe it's been said here before and other threads several times) out of a subjective review.
Maybe it just makes the sense to have two scores of a game. First review: personal opinion. Second review: As objective as possible (obviously can't review a game with no personal opinion). And, that there should be some consistent scale that metacritic sends out and says "hey if you want to be a part of this aggregate score, use this scale".
Will any of this ever happen? No, not likely. So why bother? Because it's early and I have some time to burn before work
