So evidently a bunch of ex-Rare guys got together to make basically Banjo-Threeie with the serial numbers filed off. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/playtonic/yooka-laylee-a-3d-platformer-rare-vival
Spoiler: after waiting almost two decades, everbody discover that the banjo style collectathon wasn't that fun after all.
Heck we knew that in the 90's. Look at DK64 for example. What made Banjo-Kazooie great was it was fun and charming in spite of being a collectathon game.
I'm just happy to see great talent from the past subverting The Man to bring us updated versions of old school favorites. Personally, I'm still waiting on a Metroid-clone co-op where the second player is a metroid-like thing with their own unique abilities.
So this came out this week. Some random observations after playing for a few hours: It's exactly what it said it was going to be. It plays just like the old N64 platformers (for better and for worse.) If scouring every nook and cranny of every level looking for collectables so you can get new moves to find even more collectables sounds like a good time to you then you're in for a treat. If it sounds tedious and outmoded you'll definitely hate this game. The camera's kind of a problem. Most of the time it's fine, but I swear everywhere there's a tricky jump it likes to think it knows better than you what you should be looking at. The villain isn't nearly as good as Gruntilda, but that's maybe not a very fair bar to set. I hope the duck-head-in-a-jar takes over at some point since he's way better. I also don't really care about saving a book, even if it's a magic history-eraser-book. Tooty mouthing off to Gruntilda was also way better. There is a character named Mr. Blowie. To help him you have to shoot in his mouth. It's brutally difficult, despite the levels being full to bursting with health and energy pickups. You get unlimited lives and you're gonna need all of 'em. I wish there were more and more interesting enemies. They're just kinda peppered randomly through the levels, and none of them are very memorable. They're more a respawning source of health pickups than anything. The levels are INSANELY HUGE. Like seriously you see all the stuff in the background of this screenshot? That's not background. That's the level. You can go explore all that stuff, and there's gonna be side quests to do and hidden stuff for you to find when you get there. I've played for about three hours so far and in fact have visited that stuff, and I'm still not even half done with the first level. There's like a whole underground catacomb area I can't even get into yet and god even knows what else.