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.
