Still getting it. I need my adventure platformed itch scratched.

Doing what is literally his job is no justification to call him small minded. If you think Yooka-Laylee is a good game, then play it. 

A thing can pay homage and not bring the bagage with it.  Let's not put on blindfolds and pretend there were no mistakes - not lovable quirks but outright mistakes - made in the 3D transition.  There were, tons of them.  They were forgivable when 3D was new, not 20 years after the fact.

Where is the review for the real version of this game; Switch?

which meta score would banjo kazooie receive if launched these days? I think that wouldnt be much different.

It's specially interesting when almost every single preview was received positively. Since it was announced, Yooka-Laylee never showed signs of being a "bad" game, unlike Mighty No. 9. Maybe boring, but not the near mess we are getting.

Heck, Gamexplain's review mentions that the preview builds they played ran at 60 fps, unlike the 30 fps and below review copy they have. I wanna say Team17, which handled the console versions, messed up, but the PC version isn't getting any better scores.

That's not a fair comparison though.  That game was made at the dawn of 3D gaming, this was made after 20 years of learning.  That would be like saying an X-Games gold metalist shouldn't be criticized for messing up a trick because you wouldn't be super hard on a kid who was just learning.  The fact that if Banjo Kazooie was repackaged and launched as something else would score like this is not a relevant.  It's an early 3D game, it was judged well by the standards of the time.  Yooka-Laylee, for all its nostalgia, is a 2017 game and should be expected to have learned some of the basic design lessons that last 20 years had to teach.

How is anyone surprised at this?  Practically since day 1 Yooka Laylee looked like your run of the mill medicre 3D platformer from yesteryear with the colorful Banjo Kazooie motif slapped on to make it look pretty.  The characters and level design of the game lack inspiration, only thing the game really had going for it was the nostalgia factor and the music.

Plus the whole PR flap with JonTron just before release didn't exactly help things.

Talk about divisive reviews.

Very disappointing though. I just replayed Banjo Kazooie and it still a lot of fun, but the mechanics do need to be overhauled in a modern game.

Think about it though, Nostalgia in games can't work and will bring the score down. People want smarter enemies, bigger environments, more taxing graphics, more taxing mechanics, and to do something that is basically a N64 game is like having someone review a N64 game. Putting a N64 game to today's standards is dumb and I'm pretty sure that was their goal. Not to innovate, but to replicate.