Rayman Legends

[HandsomeDead]

No impressions of this? I thought some people had it.

If you don't, well you should. This game is pretty damn amazing. I think if you played Origins you'll know what to expect when it comes to the normal platforming levels. You sprint, jump, punch and bounce your way through a bunch of levels that make some pretty creative use of Rayman and the gang's skills. Of course, it looks amazing, again, with those lush hand-drawn graphics and it has some of those funky ditties again.

But there is new stuff. You have music levels which are awesome. It's a shame there are only one per world as I'd play the heck out of a game that was just all these; they're just so much fun. I guess they're not unlike the levels in Origins where you chase the sprinting treasure chest but seeing the levels and the enemy placements sync up with the music as you take them out just adds more of a silly playfulness to it, and they are really imaginative with it, too.

The other thing they have which I think is only on the Wii U version which I played is having levels where you take control of Murfy, a new wee flying fella with a big underbite. They are controlled solely using the touchscreen of the Gamepad and you basically interact with the environments with it. Like you move platforms around so an AI controlled Goblox will navigate the level.

Early on they're not great but they do build into something a lot more interesting, and again, there is some real creative stuff going on with this different way of playing. Though some of the final levels have it fall apart slightly where Goblox will just do dumb things and get himself killed when you do the right things... it's like the levels get a bit too complex for the AI to handle.

But over all, it's amazing. Maybe the lows are lower than Rayman Origins but I think the highs are much higher than in that. It still manages to be surprising despite being a strict follow-up and it is just one of those games where you can tell everyone working on it loved working on it; you can tell, it just pours out of the screen.

[retroed]

I played through this on Vita, but never wrote impressions because stuff.

The Vita version also has the Murphy touch/gyro levels and I think they were the lowest part of the game. The rest is stellar, though. Excellent platforming and it looks absolutely gorgeous. Throw in a ton of the original Origins levels for good measure, a bunch of unlockables, and this is the definitive Rayman game. No doubt.

[Uncle Dokuro]

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I thought he was calling himself Snoop Loin now? I guess he snapped out of it and stopped smoking that tainted Jamaican ganja. Anyways this trailer for Rayman Legends makes no sense, but to be honest if Snoop Dogg is not a playable character in the next-gen version i'll be highly disappointed in Ubisoft.  

 

side note this is the North American trailer, so i not sure if it will be playable in the old country. 

[Hendo]

Played through a couple of stages. I thought the touch screen level was brilliant. Obviously it looks pretty stunning.

[retroed]

Playing through Rayman Legends again on PS4, and I'm going to go as far as saying it's one of my favourite 2D platformers of all-time. Hell, it's high up there in my favourites of any genre. I have DKC: Tropical Freeze and 3D World on the Wii U, but I'm playing this.

It's the best version I've played, too. No touch screen and gyro nonsense. Now it's just press 'O' to move obstacles, and press L1/R1 to tilt the levels. D-pad and R2 feel superb on the Dual Shock 4, perfect for this game. The touch pad is used to scratch the lucky cards, which is strangely satisfying. Still looks gorgeous and sounds wonderful. Well worth the 22 quid.

[AndyKurosaki]

Absolutely, it's certainly up there with the very best. Managed to complete the Living Dead World the other day, took some doing.

[illdog]

I've played this a lot of recent times, about 30 hours or so.

 

I've done the new game as it were, god damn it was brilliant and frustrating in equal measure. Rayman is the king of juuuust missing everything. Punching an enemy as you descend from a jump? Juuuust missed. Trying to hit that tricky section of lums so you hit them sequentially for max score? Juuuust missed.

 

And holy fuck, those invasion paintings that your being chased by your own shadow. They get proper tough, throat pinching in it's frustration. And then there's the 8 bit versions of the music levels... Fuuuuuck.

 

Anyways, it's done now and despite me shouting until my throat was sore I loved it. It's absolute genius. Looks beautiful, sounds amazing and is extremely satisfying to 100%.

 

Back to the Origins levels which I'm not loving quite so much, I feel like they've picked the levels I hated the most but they've done a grand job of making it this game a meat filled sandwich.

[Craymen Edge]

I was home sick from work yesterday and messing around on my steam link, seeing what games worked with it.

I ended up playing around 2 hour of this, and really liked it, I basically did all the levels in the first painting and a couple from the next one. It's wonderfully presented, the music and visuals are fantastic, and there's fun sense of humour throughout it.

 

That Castle Rock level at the end of the first painting (the Black Betty one), was hilarious.

 

I can already tell that it'll probably end up getting too hard for me, like Origins did towards the end. I got to a point in that one where I'd need to grind out the previous levels to get more stars or whatever is was, in order to keep unlocking levels, and I stopped there.

[retroed]

Looks and plays great on the Switch. I'll probably buy it for the umpteenth time. 

[illdog]

I played this every day for about three months at the beginning of the year, was addicted to the daily/weekly challenges and a mate of mine was also playing and the rivalry became fierce.

 

There are ways of running at speed not explained anywhere in the game, I learnt how to do it by the ghosts of the players who were beating my best times by 5-10 seconds. So if you spin jump at the start of a level, then immediately jump, press down and attack at the zenith, then jump again as soon as you hit the ground you build up a ton of speed and you can maintain this by continuing that series of inputs. If you do this on an incline you go even faster.

 

There are jumping tricks for the climbing levels and there are ways to fall faster for the Lum collecting whilst plummeting sections. We both got our Awesomeness levels to 11 which takes a fucking lot of work.

 

This was on the XB1 as it was free, i happened to have this on the PS4 as well so fired it up on that the other week and really enjoyed playing the early levels again. It would be perfect on the Switch, for the right price...

[Maf]

I played through the first 2 and a half worlds of this today and unfortunately I think I need to re-evaluate my assessment of this game. Today playing it I had a really good time, and I liked it a lot. But when I played it in 2013 this game rocked my fucking shit so to go from up there like “Holy muthafucka” to today “Yeah, this game is really cool”, it’s still good - but really not at the same level as my first time playing it.

 

The first thing that stood out is how I had completely misremembered the physics of Rayman. The way I remember it is this game had really fast, intricate and quite demanding platforming, and Rayman zooms and leaps and bounds and glides like a skater on ice. Which actually is almost never true. It is that in the chase sections and music levels, and it could be that if you wanted to speedrun it, but when trying to 100% stuff actually Rayman is quite slow and fickle. Particularly trying to wrangle Rayman’s momentum from standing. He takes a bit too long to get going when trying to avoid immediate danger but when he does speed up is almost too fast for small or awkward jumps. I mean it all works and is totally possible but it takes too much thinking about and I find myself never really using the run button at all. 
 

Add to the fact that the levels, which on one hand are expertly made. I can’t think of a platformer I played in the last decade which feels as masterclass as this when it comes to 2D platforming construction. But the pace is quite slow and collectible heavy. Add to the fact that on the PS4 the way they have tried to turn the Wii U touch screen stuff into a button push is really not great. It’s serviceable but when it does get even a little bit hectic trying to manipulate both Rayman and the environment at the same time almost divides my attention too much. 
 

But in a lot of ways this game is still top of the class. Musically it’s untouchable. And I’m not saying the soundtrack is great, which it is, but specifically the use of music is genius. In most games the player just enjoys playing a good game and good music plays over the top. Nearly every level is like playing through a musical number in a cartoon, but on occasion it fits so well the level makes a set up and the music delivers the punchline. It is ridiculously smart and outside of rhythm games it’s hard to think of another game where the gameplay and music actually mesh and compliment each other.

I don’t mean to ramble on about a 7 year old game but I’m both having a really good time playing it, but also a little disappointed it doesn’t live up to what I remember. At the time I was like “Oh, shit this might be the Mario killer”, but I was literally playing Super Mario 3 on the Switch yesterday, and in some ways yes of course it does, but actually Mario 3 kept me up after I should of went to sleep but this I found it easy to put down multiple times today. 

It is better than Mario Odyssey, I think, I will give it that

[Maf]

I have been playing this game everyday for about 3 or 4 weeks and I’ve finally hit 500,000 lums. Only another 500,000 until I unlock the last hero. 
 

I don’t really know why I’m trying to do this and it’s one of those things that make you question the intent behind some video games. 
 

The negative side to it is that trying to reach a million lums in this game is nuts because after 100%-ing every level you only really get about 72,000 lums approximately. It’s actually more than that because you get bonuses for reaching almost Scientology level tier rewards and lottery tickets that can bump up your lums as well, but these things aren’t repeatable. Only the levels are. So really the game only gives you 72,000 while asking you to reach a million. Bonuses aside, that does not scale well. 
 

The game also has daily and weekly challenges that are there to help reach that goal and keep the player coming back. But again on the negative side these daily challenges are mostly fine, but really uninspired and clearly very computer generated. And after 3 or 4 weeks it’s like what am I doing.

 

On the + side, completing the daily challenges only takes about 10 minutes a day, you actually get to keep your lums on every attempt unlike the main game (Which I think if the main game did the same as that it would alleviate this sense of being anti-player) and for gold medals, which is the highest I can get, they pay out quite well. 
 

But the overall feeling is no one gets anything out of this. Rayman isn’t an e-sport or has any micro transactions so what do they really get out of making these goals so padded, and on the player side it’s like this is neither fun enough or is going to be a big enough reward to feel like it warrants my time but also it takes very little time or effort per day to make me stop. If it was difficult I would kick it immediately but just coming in after work and playing 2 levels a day for 10 minutes is such a small ask compared to a lot of other games and their daily bullshit. But other games benefit from a daily player base, I don’t understand why you would do this for something like Rayman.

 

All the way around it makes very little sense.

[Maf]

There are some trophies in Rayman for beating your friend’s leaderboard score in the challenges. However I don’t know anyone who is playing it and the Discord server for the game is dead as a dodo. So I created a dummy account on the PS4 so I can log in, get bad scores, log in on my main account, get a good score, and get these trophies.

 

However I’m really stupid because when I was playing on the dummy account I forgot what I was doing and got a score that’s too good and I can’t beat it on my main account. So not only do I need to wait to tomorrow to try again but the dummy account now has the trophy. 

 

God dammit. 

[Maf]

This took so many attempts but I finally got a diamond cup in an online challenge. To get one of these you have to be in the top 1% of players, apparently. Baring in mind that my score is the bare minimum score to qualify lol. Like literally if I got 1659 I would have got a gold cup instead
 

[Maryokutai]

You make this sound like an achievement but look at that Italian guy. He's living in hell right now and he still managed to beat your score.

[Maf]

That Italian guy probably isn’t at school or work so it’s not 1:1. I’m still much better. 

[Maf]

Turns out what you get for a million lums is a nude Rayman skin

 

Or not skin in this case? ?

 

[Maryokutai]

That game is really old and yet I've never seen that. I suppose not many people bothered collecting that many Lums (I remember having more or less half the amount after 100%ing the rest of the game).

 

His feet look super creepy by the way.

[Maf]

Yeah, I was turned on by them too.

 

Wait. Typo. 

[Maf]

Almost at the goal, only 850 points to go. Realistically for me I can only get 140 points per week so I only have to do this every day for another...6...something....weeks ?

 

Lol it’s unreal that one of the dumbest grinds I’ve seen in a game is in a 2D platformer.