I've been trying to put a bit of time into some of the games that have been given away with Twitch Prime as I seem to be just collecting them but never really playing them at all.
First up I gave recent addition
Yookah Laylee a run out. This is so similar to the BK template circa '98 that it's almost embarrassing. I always liked but never loved Banjo back in the day (it could never compete with M64!) but to just take that and transplant it 20 years into the future doesn't really do it for me. It's achingly slow and tedious to get going, drip-feeding things to you in quite a boring fashion and making you sit through some truly cringe-inducing cut-scenes. Seriously, whoever writes this stuff has no idea how to achieve either narrative development or humour through their story-telling, let alone doing the two together!
In terms of how it plays, I couldn't think of a better game to hold up as a definition of "perfunctory". It happens, you do the things you usually do in these games, time passes, you collect more gooseberry fool and use it to open doors etc. to allow you to collect even more gooseberry fool. There's is just no charm, finesse or wit to anything that happens.
The controls in particular are just entirely devoid of the level of polish that makes a platformer truly shine. 3D Mario games (culminating with the sublime Odyssey) give you a superb set of moves which allow for an almost unprecedented amount of expression and creativity on behalf of the player, it is ludicrous amounts of fun just to arse around pulling off those moves. If all the game wanted of you was to move across a fairly dull set of spaces it would still be a joy as a result of this moveset, but they then top it all off by giving you a staggering array of interesting and inventive challenges which stretch your expectations of how to use those moves and the whole thing just sings. Yookah Laylee just dumps you with a fairly laggy set of trite run, jump and shoot commands which lack the freedom of expression to do anything new with them or find ways to use them in more interesting ways. And then gets you to do a bunch of dull things with them.
Admittedly I've only done so much of the first two worlds (although I believe there are only a handful of them anyway?!) so there is time for it to improve I guess...
It does look nice, and some of the music is quite cute, but again in a "HEY LETS MAKE IT SOUND JUST LIKE BK!!" way - it doesn't seem to know how to expand this or find something new to do/say.
FAKE EDIT: I accept that this was a KS game and that in fact most people just wanted another Banjo and therefore what I'm saying is probably a bit harsh and those people got what they wanted!