Break out your holy texts and pour one out for the Nintendo Switch, everybody. Yooka-Laylee, the Kickstarter-funded 3D platformer that was supposed to revitalize the genre but turned out to be one of the worst games of the year, now has a release date for its Switch debut. The time of death is on December 14, so you have plenty of time to mourn and pick out nice clothes for the beloved console’s funeral.
It was a short but beloved life for the Switch. Debuting in March 2017 with Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the system quickly went on to become a best-seller, immediately challenging the lead dog, the PlayStation 4, in sales. Just recently the system was graced with a far superior 3D platformer, Super Mario Odyssey.
Worst Of The Best
Bizarrely enough, the news of Yooka-Shitee coming to butcher the Nintendo Switch and everyone it loves comes just a day after the reveal of A Hat in Time’s PS4 and Xbox One release date. That game, also a Kickstarter-funded 3D platformer, has seen a far better reception despite flying under the radar and being developed by relatively inexperienced developers. Is this a knee-jerk reaction or even a challenge from Yooka-Poopee developer Playtonic Games?
Yooka-Dookee is indeed one of the worst games of 2017. With a broken camera, jumping mechanics that were simultaneously too heavy and too loose, bad controls, boring level design, awful combat, end of level quizzes designed to pad out the length, forced collectables, horrific arcade levels, annoying voice acting, and ugly graphics, everything that could have gone wrong did.
Playtonic attempted to fix some of the – oh, and the boss fights were crap too – attempted to fix some of the problems with the “Green and Purple Patch.” You can only polish a turd so much, though, especially when your idea of “polish” is throwing a Twix at the problem, and saying you did it for speed runners instead of actually acknowledging your problems.
I fully expect the Switch version of this game to be thoroughly broken. And be $10 more expensive than every other version. It’ll probably kill the Switch too. And could even sink Nintendo as a company. Possibly Japan too, as in literally sink the entire nation underwater.
