Banjo-Kazooie still isn’t getting a remake, but its spiritual successor will in October

Fans have been wanting Xbox Game Studios to bring Rare’s platformer series Banjo-Kazooie back for years. That doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon, but fans do have another game to look forward to in Yooka-Replaylee.

Yooka-Replaylee is a remake of a 2017 3D platformer created by some of the developers who worked on Banjo-Kazooie. Announced over a year ago, we finally learned of the game’s release date during The MIX Fall Games Showcase.

When is Yooka-Replaylee’s release date?

It’ll be available on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, and Nintendo Switch 2

Playtonic Games announced that Yooka-Replaylee will be released on October 9. It’ll cost $30, with those who own the original game, Yooka-Laylee, getting a 30% discount if they buy Yooka-Replaylee on the same platform digitally.

It’ll also be getting a $50 physical release. This is most notable for the Nintendo Switch 2 version of Yooka-Replaylee, as the whole game will be on a cartridge rather than a controversial Game-Key Card.

Although Yooka-Replaylee is coming out around some tough competition like Ghost of Yotei and Battlefield 6, fans of 3D platformers should really consider picking this game up. That’s doubly true if they like collectathon games, such as Bowser’s Fury or Banjo-Kazooie.

Yooka-Replaylee is based on Yooka-Laylee, a game from 2017 that was meant to recapture the magic of Banjo-Kazooie. It had the same sense of humor, duo of protagonists, and general gameplay loop of discovering secrets and collecting items in open-ended levels.

Yooka-Laylee wasn’t quite as polished as Rare’s classic, though, ultimately receiving some lukewarm reviews due to uneven level design and its wonky camera. Over time, its reputation has improved with 3D platformer fans, but Yooka-Replaylee is essentially Playtonic’s chance to fix everything that it thought was wrong with the original game.

It overhauls the visuals to make them more detailed and adds additional events to flesh out the story of the first game. Playtonic has also reworked the level design and mission structure of many areas, adding brand-new challenges on top of that. There’s also now an in-game map that should make tracking everything much easier.

Having played the demo released for Yooka-Replaylee during Steam Next Fest in June, I can say the experience finally feels like the proper spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie that it was always intended to be.

That’s a good thing, as Microsoft and Rare don’t seem very interested in reviving that franchise anytime soon. Rare was recently heavily impacted by a round of layoffs that resulted in the cancellation of several games.

Our best chance for a new Xbox-published platformer comes from whatever Psychonauts 2 developer Double Fine or Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time studio Toys for Bob are making next.

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