Pleasant Platforming
Review
Rayman
Legends, Ubisoft (PS4)
Abstract: Rayman Legends, the sequel to the critically successful Rayman Origins, is a joy to play. In
many ways, Rayman Legends is the same
great game its predecessor was. The game is whimsical and fun, with perfect
platforming controls, beautiful art, and far more content than I ever expected.
Rayman Legends is a game that works
hard to ensure you can play and enjoy it, exactly how you like. This sequel
brings many new ideas into the fold with varying degrees of success. An
overreliance on item collection plays against Rayman Legends’ strengths and a lack of challenging endgame levels left
me slightly unfulfilled upon completion. In the end, though, Rayman Legends is a terrific game that
is easy to recommend.
About a
year and a half ago I was able to pick up Rayman
Origins on the cheap. I had not played any Rayman games prior to purchasing Origins, but the game was getting terrific reviews and I was
hankering for a 2D platforming experience. What I was treated with was
completely unexpected, and completely amazing. An overwhelming sense of whimsy
permeated Rayman Origins’ tight
controls, innovative level design and wealth of challenges to take on. Rayman Origins did all of this so
confidently, too. Its world was strange, its collectables bizarre, but
everything felt consistent. Cyclopean bat monsters, a mountable mosquito and
pudgy trolls were all pieces to one eclectic puzzle that perfectly fit
together. Tight controls make or break platforming games, and Origins’ were some of the best I had
encountered in quite some time. The game had a great difficulty curve, too.
What was at first a cakewalk became a no-nonsense “make one mistake and you’re
dead” by the end of the game. I was left satisfied upon completing Rayman Origins, with an eye for what the
team would do next.
The sequel
for Rayman Origins, first announced
as a Wii U exclusive title, became multiplatform leading up to its release in
the fall of 2013, and in early 2014 for “next-generation” consoles (PS4, Xbox
One). Rayman Legends looked to have
the same charm, beautiful art and precision platforming offered by its
predecessor. My positive experience with Rayman
Origins, plus fantastic reviews, meant that Rayman Legends quickly moved to the top of my “must buy” list for
the PS4. Unfortunately, as these things usually go, I was so busy playing other
titles that I never got around to pulling the trigger on my purchase. And then
as more titles came out, Rayman Legends
slipped further and further down my video game backlog. However, two weeks
prior to writing this, Rayman Legends
was on sale for $10 on the PlayStation Network. With a price that agreeable, and a light release
schedule for January & February, I knew that now was the time to play Rayman Legends. I am so happy I finally
got around to doing so.
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| The gold bug looking things are Lums. The creature in the cage is a Teensie. Clear? Clear. |
Rayman Legends was chiefly developed by Ubisoft
Montpellier and released on PS4 in February 2014. An evil teensie wizard has
unleashed his dark magic on the land, using nightmares to capture the 10
princesses and fill the world with his monsters. You play as Rayman, his friend
Globox, or his other allies to save the princesses and rid this dream world of
the Dark teensies. All of this is told to you in an opening cinematic that
lasts no more than a few minutes, and the plot doesn’t really matter when it
comes playing the game. Your objective is to jump and punch your way through
the levels, collecting golden lums (semi-equivalent to coins in Mario or Wumpa fruit in Crash Bandicoot), freeing captured
teensies, and beating up the monsters along the way. Levels are presented as
paintings in a large art gallery. Progression is tied to how many of the hidden
teensies you free from the levels. After certain thresholds you break the locks
on later paintings, allowing you to linearly advance through the game, going
from one level to the next, or jump around to play levels that appeal to you. Rayman Legends offers you plenty of
teensies to free so even non-completionists can get through the majority of the
game without scouring every hidden corner of every level. That said, levels
demand to be replayed a couple times to optimize your score and find as many
hidden teensies as possible. At the end of each gallery of levels is a boss
fight and one special musical level, but I’ll get more into that in a bit.
In many
ways, Rayman Legends is the same
great game that Origins was. The
precise controls still feel great, never leaving you with any doubt on whether
or not you can make a jump. Gaining momentum by sprinting or attacking allow
you to perfectly titrate how fast you are moving, which is essential to fluidly
move through the levels. Rayman Legends
features the same analog style of jumping inputs as well. The duration you hold
down the jump button determines the distance covered and height reached. This
intelligently provides another layer of responsiveness to the player, so that
missed jumps or tough sections more feel the fault of the player and less so
that the game has unfair level design. This perfect control of your character
even carries over to fighting enemies. Your punch attacks can be angled in any
of the four cardinal directions, charged by holding down the button to make
them go further, and performed in the air or while running. Rayman Legends also brings back the wall
run, swimming and hover mechanics from the first game to great effect. Wall
running was a favorite of mine. It allowed the player to run along ceilings and
on sheer vertical surfaces and, with the ability to jump between parallel
surfaces, made for some of the most memorable levels in Rayman Legends.
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| When you're being chased by a giant dragon boss, you RUN. |
Also like Origins, Rayman Legends has the same beautiful art. Powered by the UbiArt engine,
which has made some of the most gorgeous 2D games in the past couple of years (Rayman, Child of Light, Valiant Hearts), everything in Rayman Legends looks great. The game has a brilliant exuberance
about it. Everything is light and fun, eccentric and colorful. Rayman Legends has this dreamlike
quality to it—though it is weird, everything feels right. There is a fullness
to Rayman Legends’ 2D world, and the
game often employs the foreground and background to great effect to create game
worlds that have a terrific visual depth. The attention to detail in the art is
remarkable. From character models to monsters to obstacles to everything in
between, you can see the work that went into creating this lush world. You
travel through a verdant jungle, and underwater industrial fortress, a Dia de
los muertos dessert world, and Rayman’s
take on Mt. Olympus. I loved the design of the ten princesses you rescue, and
subsequently can play as, throughout the game. Each time I unlocked a new one I
would play as her just to see how her art looked in motion.
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| If you couldn't tell from the other pictures I included already, Rayman Legends looks mighty fine. |
Even more
so than its predecessor, Rayman Legends
is a game that does everything in its power to get you to play it and enjoy it.
On the ‘play’ side, Rayman Legends is
jam packed with content. There are 120 levels in game, many of which have
sub-levels that allow you to move around in the same environment but with
different goals. All levels can be played solo or co-operatively, allowing you
to play the vastness of the game exactly how you (and your partners) want to. Rayman Legends also offers daily and
weekly challenges. These levels are generated every day/week and allow you to compete
with the world for high scores, incentivizing you to boot up the game every
day. On top of all that, there is a competitive mode present called Kung Foot
that uses the jump and attack mechanics to create a fun soccer-like mini game. Rayman Legends puts a particular focus
on making the act of playing all of this content enjoyable. Unlike many other
platformers, there are no lives in Rayman
Legends. Combined with a generous checkpoint system, there is essentially
no penalty for death. This allows you to play as seriously, or recklessly, as
you would like to get through the game. Within each level are a myriad of
rewards for the player to collect, too. Gathering all of the cheerful golden
lums can unlock level trophies (gold/silver/bronze), which in turn increase
your “Awesomeness” rank. Get a high enough score, and you are rewarded with a
lucky scratcher ticket. Using the touchpad on the PS4, you swipe away at the
ticket to reveal bonus prizes like lums, teensies, additional levels, or
collectable creatures. I really liked that Rayman
Legends appreciates that people play games for vastly different reasons and
rewards you for nearly any style of play.
Rayman Legends brings a wealth of new ideas to the
standard platforming experience, and is not afraid to change it up on the
player constantly. Back from Origins
are your standard exploration levels, chase levels, and boss fights. New to Rayman Legends are musical levels, which
are fantastic. In these levels, you run / jump / attack all according to the
music playing. Songs range from original creations to the covers of songs like Eye of the Tiger that have been
Rayman-ified. Going through each of these levels was a blast—they play so
smoothly and have such a joy to them that I found myself replaying each one
upon beating the game. On the topic of musical levels, I wanted to take a quick
interlude to mention how great the music is in Rayman Legends. The music is integrated into gameplay in a number
of ways, as little ditties play when collecting rows of lums, enemy noises can
synergize to create tunes, and more. While the music levels are a clear
highlight, not all of the new ideas in Rayman
Legends are as successful. One of these new ideas are ‘Murphy’ levels.
Murphy is a second character you can control with a button press who will move
obstacles out of your way, raise or lower platforms, and generally open new
avenues of exploration. It is obvious Murphy was designed for the original lead
platform, the Wii U, which utilized touch controls to move the character
around. While its implementation in the PS4 version works fine, it controls a
little awkwardly and slows the game down.
Rayman Legends is not without its faults. A major
problem that persists from the first game is an overreliance on item
collection. As you have read in earlier in my review, in each level you have so
many things you can, and have to, collect to advance through the game. But even
from a level to level, and screen to screen, perspective, this emphasis on
collection bogs down the gameplay. With controls that are so precise and
satisfying it is a shame that in many of the levels they are underutilized. If
you are taking your time exploring every nook and cranny of each screen, making
precision jumps with perfect timing is not usually required. The game really
shines on levels where you are moving fast through the environment, like the
chase and musical levels. Collection on the scale that is present in Rayman Legends slows moment to moment
gameplay down substantially and does not play to some of the game’s core
strengths. As a completionist I found the act of collecting these various items
engaging, but just wish I could have done so more fluidly and quickly.
One
personal gripe about Rayman Legends
is the loss of late game challenge. By the end of the game, the levels are only
marginally more difficult to complete than some of the earliest you encounter. Certainly
some of this arises from Rayman Legends’
increased emphasis on accessibility and catering to all styles of play, as well
as criticisms of Origins for being
too difficult. But for me, as someone who loves challenge in games and relished
some of the more hellish levels at the end of Rayman Origins, this design decision missed the mark. I suspect the
team at Ubisoft recognized that this might be an issue, so they included some
particularly tough daily & weekly challenge levels. Unfortunately, those
can only do so much. Perhaps as a way to both include more content, and more
challenge, Rayman Legends also
included 40 levels from the Rayman
Origins. This was great, as they made sure to include my favorite level
type from Origins, in which you chase
a treasure chest through a level as quickly as possible. I remember these being
quite tough, so I liked their inclusion in the game. Still, nothing came close
to matching the “Livid Boss” gauntlet from Rayman
Origins, and I missed the natural sense of progression gradually
increasingly difficulty provides. Here again, like with the heavy emphasis on
collectables, the lower difficultly does the amazing controls a disservice.
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| Not as hard as it might look. |
When looked
at independently, Rayman Legends is a
spectacular game that gets so much right. Its tight controls, gorgeous visuals,
and dreamlike splendor are in a league of their own. When compared to its
predecessor, however, some of the games faults become evident. Overall, new
ideas seem slightly less successful in Legends
than in Origins, but I applaud the
work that went into the creation and execution of them. Still, Rayman Legends is a pure platforming
experience that has playful energy and whimsy. It is a game that is fun to play
casually or seriously, alone or with friends. All things considered, especially
given the sheer amount of content in the game, Rayman Legends an easy game to recommend.
Rayman Legends
4/5
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