Banjo-Kazooie vets reveal new trailer, announce delay to 2017.
In May of 2015, a gaggle of ex-developers from the game studio Rare made the crowd-funding rounds with dreams of resurrecting the 3D-platformer genre—and the results have finally begun to bear fruit. Yooka-Laylee, the debut project from Playtonic Games, looks like a blatant love letter to N64 classic Banjo-Kazooie. This week, the game has finally been received a proper video reveal almost exactly a year after the dev team concluded its £2,100,000 ($3.2 million) campaign.

The trailer, seen below, was apparently saved to help fans swallow the hard pill of a game delay. Yooka-Laylee has been pushed back from its original October 2016 promise to "Q1 2017." New publisher Team 17 (of Worms fame) will handle the game's Xbox One, PS4, Wii U, and Steam releases next year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1gxLvbX3Ow

From the look of things, Playtonic seems dead-set on making a third Banjo-Kazooie (Banjo Three-ie?) in everything but name and main characters. Lizard and bat combine to double-jump, float, roll, and transform into other temporary creatures while traversing what appear to be some large, incredibly colorful worlds. Floating blocks, magically appearing platforms, and races (including a roll through a tunnel and a Donkey Kong Country-esque mine cart ride) fill out the brief preview footage found in an official trailer and a Eurogamer eyes-on preview.
The footage teases a couple of things the B-K games didn't include much of, including a screen-filling fire attack, a helper who unlocks retro-themed mini-games, and a very brief taste of a stealth-sneaking section. However, the trailer does include the most cheekily named helper character yet in a Rare-affiliated game: Trouzer the snake.

One thing the released video footage doesn't really show off is the game's expanding-world properties, which tie into the B-K series' focus on collectibles. Should Yooka and Laylee collect enough of a level's hidden "pagies" (assumedly like B-K's "jiggies"), new 3D terrain like platforms or waterfalls will appear in a level, unlocking previously inaccessible zones that, yes, hide even more pagies.

For now, the video footage doesn't provide any major sense of scale. It's really hard to tell whether these worlds are large, or whether we're getting a preview whose camera angles have been positioned to make things look bigger than they really are. At the very least, the videos show off incredible character animations and cute designs; it's just too bad we'll have to wait another few months to sink our cartoon-bat's fangs in. We'll see if we can go controller-on with the game at E3, but considering that even Eurogamer was kept at arm's length during a recent preview event, we're not getting our hopes up.