After successfully relaunching Rayman two years ago with the massively successful game Rayman Origins, Ubisoft is back with the sequel Rayman Legends, originally intended as a Wii-U exclusive, the company made the decision after initial sales of the Wii U were below expected to spread it across all consoles including the Playstation Vita. The game is quite beautiful incorporating some gorgeous colour and platforming multi-player action, as well as a pretty solid 12 hour story, there is loads to do here.
You play as Rayman (mostly) with a ton of characters to unlock, and work your way through some of the best animated platforming levels we have seen in the last few years. There are some 3D bosses that are a lot of fun to interact with and the combination of 2D and 3D blend together seamlessly.
Story wise this game doesn’t really offer anything out of the ordinary, there are Teensies to rescue that blend with 90’s Tiny Toons/Animaniacs music that show character and heart in place of an actual story. But really trying to get a story out of a platformer seems like a redundant issue.
Playing the levels is engaging as a single player, but it does support 4 player co-op (5 with the Game Pad!) if you want to get your friends involved. But be wary if you are playing with noobs who like to stop and smell the roses, this will become frustrating as Legends does move quite fast and the gameplay doesn’t keep things moving. You are only as fast as all of your characters collectively. But do keep your friends around for the hard to reach areas that require more than one player to reach, just look out for those massive green branches with thorns that are always placed WAY too close together.
The main difference with the Wii U version is the assistant, it switches to the GamePad, forcing you to play minigames to continue through different levels. Also clearing obstacles out of the way for other characters to guide them through safely is a little glitchy at times with the ai seemingly not so smart, but this is only a tiny annoyance and the only bad thing about this game.
Rayman Legends builds on the Origins story and while it doesn’t bring anything terribly new to the platforming genre, it does deliver an addictive platformer with some varying modes that will keep you coming back time and time again.
Rayman Legends is now available on Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Wii U, Nintendo 3DS and Playstation Vita.
Review by Alaisdair Dewar
