Despite all of their outdated issues, I have a soft spot for 3D platformers that makes itself known whenever something like Super Mario Odyssey finds a clever way to breathe new life back into the genre. Yooka-Replaylee, which remixes a platformer that was already soggy with nostalgia, doesn’t get anywhere near that bar, but it does at least succeed in making the cute-but-forgettable adventure of 2017’s Yooka-Laylee into something more competent. My biggest gripes with the original, including camera issues, sloppy controls, and a lack of fast travel, have all been addressed, with lots of fat and ideas that didn’t work being thrown out as well. But there’s also an odd Frankenstein quality to this reworked creation, a surprising number of technical shortcomings, and the same unrelenting focus on nostalgia for the 3D platformers of yesteryear that results in almost nothing unique or novel. There are still good times to be had with this charming lizard/bird duo, but the reconfigured experiment that serves as their latest adventure only succeeds at turning a game that never quite worked into something a little less underwhelming.

More than the simple remaster its cheeky title might imply, Yooka-Replaylee is a complete overhaul that fixes a pretty large number of missteps, but it’s still a 3D platforming collectathon at its heart. It wears its on-the-nose Banjo-Kazooie inspirations on its sleeve, so you’ll be hopping, gliding, and rolling around colorful worlds while chatting with dorky, googly-eyed characters as you hunt for the all-important “Pagies” required to unlock the next area. Fortunately, now you can do all that sans the absolutely atrocious camera and imprecise controls of the original, which is quite nice, and everything from the quests you’ll tackle to the story to even things as fundamental as the number of Pagies you’re collecting has been completely redesigned, to its benefit more often than not.

Whether you’re solving basic jumping puzzles, fighting goofy looking monsters, or playing minigames like a gem-grabbing minecart ride, Yooka-Replaylee never gets any more challenging than requiring the rare second attempt. Combat in particular is as straightforward as can be, as it usually amounts to just spamming the tailspin attack until everything dies, and enemies are absolutely rubbish at being able to land hits on you. The improved controls and camera also mean the extreme simplicity of its platforming has become more glaring, and most puzzles can be solved just by knowing the basic bag of movement tricks in your belt. That could be springboarding off of Yooka’s tail for increased jumping height or learning that you can eat certain objects to augment your powers, like red orbs that give Yooka the ability to spit fire and melt things. It’s extremely basic stuff, and while it all plays much better without as much wonkiness, it’s just not that exciting to begin with.

That said, a lot of work has clearly been put into making this version feel much better, as Yooka-Laylee’s awkward camera angles and slippery movement used to be near-constant annoyances. Probably the best compliment I can give is that I almost never thought about the camera while playing, because it was never really an issue. Of course, I’d occasionally get stuck in some weird corner or whatever and momentarily have to swing the camera around, but with controls that feel quite smooth, it never caused me much trouble as I hopped around hungrily gobbling up Pagies. I never raged during the rare instances where I failed a platforming attempt, either, since I only had myself to blame for any muck ups this time around.

But tighter controls do nothing to address Yooka-Replaylee’s biggest issue: the original was already an unambitious throwback that played on your love of old school 3D platformers instead of trying to push that mold or do something interesting within it. Yooka-Replaylee is quite literally a remake of a game that was itself already a remix of old ideas, and a fresh coat of paint doesn’t solve the underlying problem of this all feeling generic and unsurprising. The fact that it’s coming out an additional eight years later certainly doesn’t help with that either, as we’ve had even more time to outgrow these dated designs as standouts like Astro Bot or Donkey Kong Bananza explored the genre in more exciting ways. Even when I was impressed by just how much they improved here, I still struggled to find a reason to recommend this to anyone when they could just play Astro Bot instead.

That’s not to say it’s exactly the same, and one of the more fundamental changes is the overall pace of the adventure. Instead of unlocking abilities as you go by collecting a special currency in each area, you get all of those abilities right away and then learn to take advantage of them as they come up during platforming puzzles. Similarly, rather than unlocking different sections of each of the five main levels in phases, you have access to their full maps right from the get-go and can even fast travel to different points to minimize monotonous backtracking, which is awesome. And instead of 25 somewhat sparse Pagies to find in each level, this number has been doubled to 50, so you get to watch Yooka and Laylee delightfully freak out about finding one twice as often.

All of these tweaks combine to make everything about Yooka-Replaylee feel faster and less linear. Instead of seeing a Pagie out of reach and knowing you’ll have to return to get it once you’ve unlocked a certain ability you don’t yet have, you can more or less sprint through each zone grabbing everything in sight until you’ve utterly cleared it. Even cooler: you’re given a map with a checklist of all the Pagies in each world, so you can scratch your completionist itch without wandering around for hours in search of something that’s alluding you – unless that thing is a Pagie piece, which they don’t show you on the map for some frustratingly inconsistent reason, so you could spend three hours searching for the last one on a level like I definitely didn’t do.

Removing these artificial barriers to progress is without question a good decision, and it was quite freeing to be let loose in each world to methodically solve every puzzle and combat encounter in my path, but there are some pretty weird side effects of making so many overhauls as well. The most wonky example stems from the increased number of Pagies, which completely alters the flow of the adventure in some pretty unappealing ways. If the original Yooka-Laylee was explicitly designed around the 3D platforming philosophy of classic games like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, where collectibles were harder to get but more meaningful, then Yooka-Replaylee has been adapted to be more like Super Mario Odyssey, where you’re picking up items left and right. The problem is that some remain hidden behind legacy designs that ask you to win a minigame or beat a boss, while you’ll find others just lying around in easily reachable places or crammed into spots that don’t feel like a terribly natural fit. On the bright side, you get the dopamine hit of finding collectibles twice as often, but it feels pretty odd when some take significantly more effort than others, which serves as a fairly obvious reminder of just how much this thing has been altered.

The most extreme instance of this tweak going awry is the fact that, after doing a completionist run of the first two worlds, I realized I had gathered enough Pagies to just… go finish the story? That’s right – I still only needed 120 of these guys to head to the big baddie’s lair and trigger the final boss fight, and since that’s a lot easier now than it once was, I walked right into his home and rolled credits before even entering the other three stages. I’m not sure if this was an intentional decision to give players more freedom to approach the adventure how they want, but it just felt downright weird to do, especially since some of the cutscenes along the way still reference events that are supposed to take place in the worlds I skipped. For this reason, I was actually able to roll credits after just four hours, then went back and spent another seven on the other levels in the most anti-climactic way possible, completely removing any urgency to be a completionist with the remaining worlds.

The unexpected side effects of this heavily revised collectathon’s Frankenstein construction are all over the place. For example, in the original you had lots of reasons to talk to fun side characters like Trowzer the snake, who had a chance to show off his amusing personality as he sold you all of your platforming abilities. But since you get access to those abilities right at the start now, Trowzer has been relegated to an entirely optional vendor you only have a reason to chat with maybe once per stage, leaving him devoid of most of the silly bits and one-liners he previously delivered. Another example of this is one of the villains, Dr. Quack, who used to goof around with you as he forced you to take his annoying quizzes throughout the story. These have been removed completely, which I’m certainly not crying about as these sections were never much fun, but it also means you don’t really get to build a relationship with this guy and lose a lot of the heart that was previously one of Yooka-Laylee’s strengths.

Don’t get me wrong: I still think the vast majority of these changes are a step in the right direction, even when they introduce some jankiness or come at the cost of some jokes getting dropped. It’s just abundantly clear how much this thing has been tortured to correct for errors of the past, to the point where it almost feels like it would have been a better idea to just make a new game altogether. The story in particular feels like a casualty to all the revisions, since you speak to characters far less and spend a whole lot less time understanding the bad guys and their motivations, so it almost feels like you’re required to have played Yooka-Laylee (and remember enough of it) to understand this remake.

Whether you do or not, it’s at least easy to appreciate just how good Yooka-Replaylee looks. The visual improvement over the original is absolutely massive. Everything is more colorful, lighting has been fixed so you never feel like you’re wandering through the dark, and Yooka and friends are more expressive. Plus, you can enjoy how pretty it all looks with a whole bunch of neat cosmetics to swag up your heroes as you explore. Unfortunately, this glow-up is offset by the fact that I encountered numerous technical shortcomings, from abrupt crashes to framerates absolutely tanking during boss fights or other unfortunate moments. Crashes were fairly rare, and unlike with Yooka-Laylee, I never fell through the map or got caught on the environment, but the framerate dips were worse than anything I encountered in the original, and happened often enough to leave me pretty irritated.