YMMV / Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair

• Awesome Music: Courtesy of David Wise and Grant Kirkhope returning from the first game, with such fantastic tracks as The One Book and Mechanical Melody. Special mention goes to Clinking Carnival by Dan Murdoch, along with Underwater Saunter by Matt Griffin.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Once the player manages to unlock the Quill Magnet tonic, they'll likely never take it off. Not only does it draw in quills through enemies and walls, circumventing several tricky platforming challenges, it absolutely trivializes the Ghost Quills (a fact that the tonic's description points out) by making it much easier to collect the quills they drop. Since several Ghost Quills reward you with either TWIT Coins or items needed to get TWIT Coins for collecting all their quills, this makes a boon even to players who aren't trying to unlock every tonic and just want to get all the coins. And unlike other extremely useful tonics, it has no penalty for use!
• Demonic Spiders: The red, spiky variant of the snail enemy is one of the most annoying enemies in the game. It can't be jumped on due to its spiked shell, and it likes to roll up into a ball and chase you around. The only way to defeat it is to use projectiles or trick it into rolling off a ledge. Though it's not too hard to accomplish this, they're liable to hit you and scare Laylee away before this happens due to the way they follow you.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • In pretty stark contrast to the previous game, The Impossible Lair has been met with open arms by Donkey Kong fans, particularly fans of the Retro Studios entries. Some have taken to calling it the closest we may ever get to a proper Tropical Freeze sequel (at least for some time).
  • In a similar vein, some fans of this game also like Marsupilami: Hoobadventure, due to both games being Spiritual Successors to Donkey Kong Country, and both games having a similar art direction.
• More Popular Spin-Off: Despite being a 2D side-scrolling spinoff to the prior game, it managed to rack up much more positive attention than its 3D counterpart due in part many players finding this game to be a unique take on its genre, as well as the game feeling better to play.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In order to earn the Gold Tonic and secret ending in the initial release, players must complete the Impossible Lair from the very top without any Beetalion members. While a no-hit run would usually seem rational for a game with a final level available right away, "from the very top" doesn't just mean entering the level without any bees- it means from a clean save file. So if players fail at any point during the nightmarishly long stage, it's back to the file select screen and playing the tutorial again before another attempt at the lair, steps that shouldn't even be necessary. Woe behold anyone who simply enters the level with zero bees in the initial release. This was fixed in the April 2020 patch, with the option added of going to the Impossible Lair with or without bees.
  • Getting hit with Laylee causes her to fly around and give you a chance to catch her. However she flies very fast and can randomly make sharp turns at any moment making reclaiming her more likely to get you killed than not.
  • It is extremely easy to get locked out of collecting T.W.I.T. Coins since they often only give you one shot or because the stages are littered with points of no return, forcing you to either intentionally die or restart the stage if you passed a checkpoint.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: While the original Yooka-Laylee had its share of difficult and aggravating moments, nothing in that game reached the level of gleefully cruel platforming hell contained within The Impossible Lair.
• Sidetracked By The Golden Saucer: Many people consider exploring the overworld to be even more fun than the actual levels due to its size, plentiful secrets, and breadth of puzzles to solve.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: The first Yooka-Laylee, while not without its fans, suffered from obvious issues with polish and was criticized for feeling like a rehash of the Banjo-Kazooie games. This game not only starts carving out its own niche for the series by going in a side-scroller direction, but also substantially improves on the controls, level design and all around polish, earning near-unanimously positive critical acclaim upon release.
• That One Level:
  • "Production Path" was a pretty difficult level on its own, but its altered form, "Production Path - Panic" certainly lives up to its name. The player is relentlessly chased through the level, in a reverse path from the original level, by instakill laser beams that leave little room for error. Good luck surviving the beams AND getting all five T.W.I.T. Coins.
  • "Cliffside Quest - Cold" is very long and has way more difficult rooms than regular Cliffside Quest, complete with being hard to navigate with basically all surfaces being slippery. Special mention to the far left room with slippery falling platforms that are bound to send you into a panic and no checkpoint.
• Win Back the Crowd: While the previous game certainly found an audience, the general reception from both critics and players was decidedly mixed. If the reviews are anything to go by, The Impossible Lair managed to win over those who were skeptical of Playtonic's ability to recapture the spirit of their older titles, with many comparing it positively to Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze.^note The PS4 version of the original game earned a Metacritic score of 68, while The Impossible Lair earned an 84.

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