Rayman Legends (2013)

Rayman Legends lives up to its name. It is an amazing platformer with colorful artwork, fast paced play and a ton of stuff to do. It’s a direct sequel to the previous installment, Rayman Origins and gives you a huge new game to complete.

The game follows a simple story in which a dark magician splits into five Dark Teensies and captures all the princesses and Good Teensies. It is up to Rayman, Murfy and Globox to save all the Teensies, collect as many Lums as possible and defeat the five Dark Teensies. On your journey, you fight multiple bosses, time trials and running stages in which, you need to time your jumps just right.

You travel trough different worlds, each with a unique theme. You got a forest world, ancient Rome, Mexican dessert, underwater levels and a volcanic wasteland. It gives great variety, and each stage offers some unique puzzles and ways to beat it. Every stage requires some thinking and a different strategy, keeping the game fresh at all times.

Rayman Legends is a very big game. For the price you pay, you get a ton of content. You got the campaign levels in which you must save all the seven hundred Teensies, you got the “Back to Origins” levels, which feels like an entire campaign besides the main one and a lot of different challenge levels, a soccer game, and a nice gallery in which you can see all the unlocked “creatures”, which you earn by scratching open cards that you earn for completing levels. It takes many hours to complete this game and for me, this felt great because I really like arcade platformers like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot in which you need to complete and collect stuff.

Like I said before, the game features some unique and beautiful artwork. Everything looks out of proportion, cartoonish and jolly, and for this game, it works beautifully. The way you unlock portraits and jump into them is really fun and adds to the literal art style of the game. It also has some kind of Gothic theme over it that I really like. The animations and effects are nice to look at and enhances the game.

The music tracks and sound effects are also great. It is just as jolly as the artwork and graphics and has a symphonic vibe over it. I especially liked the music levels, in which popular songs are remixed into a “Rayman Legends 8-bit” variant and you need to perform jumps and dodges in sync with the music.

Rayman Legends is really well balanced. There is a perfect mix between frustration, challenge and fun. It can be hard as bricks and some challenges require many retries or practice, but eventually you will master it and finish the stage. Many stages and tasks are just remembering the patterns but because of the good checkpoint system in place, you can try again in seconds.

There is a complaint from my side however about Rayman Legends. You can compete in online leader boards and ranking in which you can earn points and increase your “awesome score”. This consists of eleven levels and the score can be increased by completing levels in the main story and the Back to Origins levels and by completing challenges and earning a bronze, silver or gold cup for the set time. Reaching level ten is not that hard and will come naturally to you, but to truly beat and complete the game full, you need to reach level eleven, a feat that will require excessive grinding and can take up to a full year of daily challenges to complete, if you only earn bronze cups on the daily challenges. This was really a bummer for me because I do not have the mad skills to beat the best of the world and earn a diamond cup on each challenge. So this is the only trophy that I cannot earn and it bothered me more than it should.

Nevertheless, Rayman Legends is an amazing game, and I would recommend it to everyone.

Rayman is a truly amazing game and has quickly become one of my favourite 2D platformers of all time.

The presentation in this game couldn't really get any better. The Ubi Art engine makes things look absolutely stunning and it often feels like you're playing a beautiful Disney cartoon or something. The worlds are full of colour and varied and the backgrounds have a staggering amount of detail in them. The animations and enemies are superb and the amount of imagination in the levels is just incredible. Musically things are just as fantastic with a large variety of great soundtracks throughout the game, the musical levels are a particular highlight. The sound effects are great too, really adding to the satisfaction of the gameplay. A you'd expect things move along with a solid 60 fps which never slows down too. I honestly can't think of a single thing to complain about when it comes to the presentation on this game. It's just brilliant.

Moving onto the gameplay. Well Rayman Legends doesn't disappoint here either. The controls are tight and the way your character moves is just right, not too floaty or stiff, you feel in complete control. It feels incredibly satisfying whacking enemies thanks to the simple, yet effective controls coupled with the great sound effects. Freeing teensies from their cages is very satisfying too for the same reasons. Most levels are fairly lengthy affairs in which there are 10 teensies to collect, but a few are shorter more intense affairs in which there are only 3 teensies. This really helps to mix things up and I particularly enjoyed the murphy levels in which the player is no longer in control of the main character but instead has to help them out by moving objects out of his way or indeed in his way to help him get across a gap for example. I enjoyed the different pace that thse murphy levels brought to the game and I really liked the way they made use of the Wii U gamepad. It felt incredibly satisfying shifting things around for the main character to be able to complete the course. The absolute highlight for me however were the musical levels. At the end of each world there is a level featuring a brilliant remix of a famous song in which you sprint along and every enemy you hit or item you collect is in time with the music and adds to the song. It really is one of those gaming experiences that you'll just never forget. I'm not sure I've ever laughed so much while playing a single-player game as I have on those levels.

Although I haven't played much multiplayer what I have played has been chaotic and enjoyable. The simple 'Kung-Foot' game is a particularly great addition but even just doing the normal levels with 2-4 characters jumping around on the screen is a huge amount of fun and works very well.

In terms of the content this game has plenty. Yes the main game is a little short taking me under 10 hours until I got to the credits however the sheer amount of extra levels and challenges at least doubles that length and probably goes way beyond that even if you want to collect every single teensie! There are 5 main worlds and on each level you have a chance to collect a lucky ticket if you get a high enough score (this generally isn't too hard to achieve). These tickets can give you a variety of things such as creatures which you can collect or most importantly Rayman Origins paintings. These are levels from the original game. There are an extra 5 worlds here and they add their own challenges and charm to the game! I would say it would have been better if all these Origins levels were unlocked a little quicker so you could play them through in order but chances are as long as you're regularly getting the lucky tickets you'll have plenty of them already unlocked by the time you finish the main game. On top of this there are 'invasion' levels which are time-trial runs based on all the main levels. The amount of teensies you get is based on how quickly you finish the trial. I've never been a very time-trially type of person but I still find these enjoyable and they add a lot of replay value. To someone who likes doing speed-runs etc these will be a fantastic addition!

All in all this is a truly wonderful game. The visuals and music are just magical and the game is so satisfying to play that I'll be coming back to this one for many years I'm sure. The seemingly endless content to unlock makes it have plenty of replay value too and it is one of those games you can just turn on and be in the thick of the action within minutes. It's already become one of my favourite 2D platformers of all time (tied with Donkey Kong on the Game Boy). A magical experience that every gamer should try.