Super Yooka-Laylee Kart is Yooka-Laylee's next title, naturally

Yooka and Laylee are going from paying tribute to classic 3D platformers to joining the kart racing circuit, as mascots do.

by · Shacknews

Once upon a time, Yooka-Laylee was created as a spiritual successor to Rare's Banjo-Kazooie series. It had a lot of problems, but many of those were fixed in 2025's Yooka-Replaylee. Now that the chameleon and bat tandem have cemented themselves in the platforming space, the logical next step is to take over the kart racing world. As part of Friday's Day of the Devs: Summer Game Fest Edition 2026 showcase, Playtonic Games announced that Super Yooka-Laylee Kart would take the Yooka-Laylee characters to the race track for the first time.

While Yooka-Laylee (and the later Yooka-Replaylee) emulated the Nintendo 64-era platformer, Super Yooka-Laylee Kart is taking its visual style from the original Super Mario Kart. Boasting a 16-bit visual style, players will take part in third-person races across obstacle-filled tracks, using a slew of debilitating items to derail opponents. While the presence of items certainly imply that luck will play a role in who crosses the finish line, each of this game's characters will have their own special moves to master, meaning a semblance of skill will be needed to achieve victory. Variety shouldn't too much of an issue in Super Yooka-Laylee Kart, because Playtonic is looking to add dozens of different options and custom rules for the game's multiplayer, which will support up to eight players either online or through local split-screen.

However, the most interesting mechanic here is the Rage meter. Have you ever seen those videos of a poor soul in Mario Kart riding high in first place before getting bombarded with item, after item, after item until they'd fall into 12th place? You might have seen something like that happen to Asif Khan a few times. That can still happen in Super Yooka-Laylee Kart, but moments like that will fill up the Rage meter, which can unleash a variety of revenge effects when used.

Source: Playtonic Friends

Super Yooka-Laylee Kart is coming soon to PC. Playtonic will look to hold beta tests for the game's online multiplayer features sometime down the road.

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