IMPORTANT: Do not play this game if your PC can't achieve 60 FPS.
The lower your framerate is, the slower the game will be. Many challenges are timed and use the real-time clock. Trying to finish a challenge in time is impossible if the character is moving at only 1/3 its normal speed.
Review:
This game is a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie, and the similarities are more than obvious. Unfortunately, it's just not a very good game, especially when compared to its N64 predecessors.
While Yooka-Laylee has larger worlds with more stuff to collect, everything is packed so densely together that the game feels lacking in content. And most challenges are so easy, you feel like you're just collecting scrap rather than earning rewards. The worlds are also completely independent, unlike in Banjo-Tooie, where one world could affect another.
The game feels repetitive, even though it's not. While most challenges are relatively varied and unique, each world has a Mining Kart challenge and an Arcade Machine. Without them the game would've felt much less repetitive, and I would've given 3 stars instead. The Arcade Machine is the worst offender: While its mini-games are a nice change of pace, you need to finish each game twice (once to finish the mini-game, once more to beat the Highscore) to get all reward. Even if you play well enough to beat the Highscore the first time around, you have to play twice.
Yooka-Laylee has awful affordances. What are "affordances", you ask?
If the game gives you grenades, which you'll need to destroy cracked stone blocks, then you'll expect to be able to destroy cracked objects with grenades. It's how the game teaches the player what they can or can't do. Yooka-Laylee has cracked glass windows, which can't be destroyed with grenades. It even has a move specifically for destroying glass, which won't work either. And that's just a small example of Yooka-Laylee's awful affordances.
And finally: the camera is simply awful...
