Yooka-Laylee shows Rextro Arcade multiplayer options

Yooka-Laylee [official site] - the Rare-esque 3D platformer with the chamaeleon and bat odd couple pairing - will be getting a bunch of multiplayer minigames alongside its single player story mode.

If you're at all familiar with the games upon which Yooka-Laylee is based this won't actually be a surprise. In fact, it would have been more of a surprise if there were no minigames, but this is the first I've read about said minigames so here is your confirmation that they exist.

Yooka-Laylee is very much in the mould of/a love letter to games like Banjo-Kazooie. It also shares some team members with those older games. I've only had a few minutes of hands-on time with the game on a busy EGX show floor but I spent most of that noting the points where Yooka-Laylee seemed to be reskinning an older framework but not really building on it. It's Banjo-Kazooie 3 (or 4 or 6, depending on how you feel about Nuts & Bolts and the handheld releases) which is no bad thing, it's more that in that short demo slice I didn't get a sense of where Yooka-Laylee was doing anything different as I'm not a big nostalgia nut. I'm hoping I've just missed something and that the game will click when I play it!

Anyhoodle. Minigames. Banjo-Kazooie had a few singleplayer minigames, but a big thing I remember about Banjo-Tooie was that there were a few multiplayer options. Targitzan's Temple Shootout was a maze shooter in the vein of something like Goldeneye 64 but there were also hoop jumping challenges, balloon bursting and so on. The one we played a lot of was the Dodgems Challenge where you tried to run over a higher value of things called Twinklies with your little car.

The Yooka-Laylee minigames seem to offer some racing options, some shooting options, some arena challenges and some rushing about collecting stuff options. As per the official site:

"There are eight different games – accompanied by retro-tastic tunes from the one and only Steve Burke (Kameo, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts) – including arena brawler Glaciators, old-school racer Kartos Karting and the friendship-destroying Jobstacle Course."

The site adds:

"As well as the local multiplayer arcade games, Yooka-Laylee offers a second player the opportunity to co-star in the main Yooka-Laylee adventure. Taking control of the Bee Team, a second player can grab quills, collect and store butterflies, stop traps and more!"

Banjo-Threeie Yooka-Laylee will be out on 11 April.