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Yooka-Laylee

Yooka-Laylee - Beginner Tips

We've pulled together some handy pointers to help you get to grips with the colourful platformer.

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Yooka-Laylee has finally been released this month after a successful Kickstarter campaign launched in May 2015 (you can read our review here) and although this harks back to the golden era of 3D platformers on the Nintendo 64, you may still need some tips to help you get the most out of your time with Yooka and Laylee. We've compiled our list down below to make sure you can take down Capital B in the best way possible.

Yooka-Laylee

Buy Trowzer's abilities as soon as you can: Within the first half an hour of the game you'll meet a snake called Trowzer, who provides you with your abilities in the game. These are sometimes free, but every time you enter a new world you'll have more available to purchase for quills. Getting these as soon as they're available will help you immensely, because when you get to a puzzle you'll know that it's simply a case of working out how to solve it, rather than not having the right ability for the job.

When you can fly, use it for surveillance: In the later half of the game, Trowzer gives you the gift of flight, allowing you to soar over the levels and take a look around. Since your power bar drains rather slowly when you're flying (as long as you don't flap around too much), this is pretty useful for seeing where you can explore, as you can see where pagies are, where you haven't been before, and also get around a bit quicker, all of which is pretty useful considering how big some of the worlds can be.

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Yooka-Laylee
Once you can fly, use it to see far and wide.

Don't rush! We made the mistake when playing Yooka-Laylee for review of rushing ahead, because the worlds in the game don't require a ridiculous amount of pagies to unlock, so this means you can essentially get to the door for the last boss with less than 40 pagies under your belt. However, the requirement to get past this door is 100 pagies, meaning there's a hell of a lot of grind to get the number you need, so it's worth avoiding this pain by getting as many pagies as early on as you can.

Remember what you've seen and where: There are a lot of characters and challenges in Yooka-Laylee, and unfortunately you might not be able to interact with all of them until you've got abilities unlocked later in the game, so it's worth making either a mental or physical note of where you've seen people or places of interest so you know where to go in order to get those sweet, sweet pagies on your return. The same applies to when you get stuck on challenges and take a break from them.

Yooka-Laylee
Trowzer is definitely someone you want to keep an eye out for...
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Expand your worlds: Each world (or tome) in Yooka-Laylee can be expanded by spending pagies, essentially giving you more of that world to explore, and this is not only useful, but also necessary, as you can't 100% complete a level without expanding it. Saying that, we'd say take some time in the unexpanded world to make sure you know what's coming in the expanded bits, as sometimes the easiest challenges can be in the original parts of the level before you expand it.

Collect all the quills: This sounds fairly obvious, but you might be lured into thinking that you don't need to collect absolutely every quill in the game because they're so numerous, but considering Trowzer hikes up his prices and they don't respawn, we'd say it's worth making the effort to collect as many as you can as quickly as you can. Also, they count towards 100% completion of the game, so if you want to have everything done in that sense, there's every reason to pay attention to where they are.

Yooka-Laylee
Quills are everywhere, but remember to pick them up.

Experiment with puzzles: Despite its bright colours and family-friendly appeal, Yooka-Laylee's puzzles can sometimes be a bit optuse, to say the least, and some solutions require a bit of experimentation. The game isn't afraid to withhold information either, so you may be able to do something you never thought possible just by using your brain and all your abilities. After all, you'll be needing those pagies, and they don't exactly grow on trees now do they?

Check the requirements for Play Tonics: Early in the game you'll meet a character called Vendi, who gives you Play Tonics if you've completed certain requirements, and it's worth always checking these out if you want a specific tonic, as they give you certain abilities or buffs (extra health, for example). You can then work to complete these challenges to unlock all of the tonics, which will subsequently help you in the game. It also encourages you to try with different play-styles too.

Yooka-Laylee
Play Tonics can help with many things, including combat.

There are our top tips for helping you on your way through Yooka-Laylee. Did we miss anything? Let us know below!

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Yooka-LayleeScore

Yooka-Laylee

REVIEW. Written by Sam Bishop

"There's a lot to do, a lot to find, and a lot of laughs to be had, all wrapped up in a well-designed and polished adventure."



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