Rayman Legends Review

I really do love Rayman. I remember playing the Rayman 2 demo back on the Dreamcast, thinking it was great. Since then I had fun playing through Rayman Origins, and Rayman Legends. I love the world, the art style, the animations, the great music – I mean who adds whistling to their music anymore. Everything about Rayman is great. That being said, I am so, so terrible at Rayman that it’s hard for me to go back to it after I’ve beaten it. Ironically it’s a game that wants you to replay it to get all the secrets.

Like lots of kids, I grew up playing Super Mario. I found all the warp tunnels in 1 and 2, I refuse to use warp whistles in 3, in Super Mario World I completed the Star Road…you get the idea. But I’ll tell you what, there wasn’t much in Mario that prepared me for playing Rayman.

See, the objective in Rayman isn’t just trying to get from the beginning of each level to the end. If you want to get the full experience out of it, then you’re going to be getting as many Lums and Teensies as you can. This will require what feels to me like mastering every jump, dash, and wall rebound to collect every item. You’ll also search for hidden rooms with some light platforming puzzles, which as much as I hate puzzles I found them to be a fun change of pace.

For all the commercials and footage I saw before buying it that showed the characters running and vaulting over obstacles and such, I feel slower than frozen molasses when I play it because I’ve found that if I rush through the levels, I get killed. A lot. So to save me from chucking my controller out the window and screaming about how life isn’t fair, I learned that it really is okay to take my time at first and once I get familiar, then I can run like a crackhead through each level. And really if you take the time to explore a little bit you’ll catch the hidden rooms I mentioned. So win/win. I get some more lums and teensies, and Mrs Controller isn’t grounding me from gaming for a week because I ragequit and passed out from my blood pressure going up.

It’s fun chaos and you’ll enjoy it up until you decide to chastise your friends for being awful at the game, to which they’ll reply by saying that they don’t own it, “pretend” that they didn’t mean to punch you off a ledge and kill you, and you’ll both quietly resent each other for the rest of the day.

While you’re doing all this platforming, you’re going to notice and collect some really memorable characters and gorgeous levels. I do NOT know what the artists were on when they made this, but the level and enemy design are great and completely insane. You’ll have basic forest or jungle levels but then out of nowhere you’ll have a level where you’re firing punching fist-missile-things at enemies or outrunning a wall of fire or you’ll be turned into a chicken and running through some sausage obstacle course with more fire underneath you. All of these lead to boss battles that are really creative and fun. In Legends, you’ll also unlock a bunch of content from Rayman Origins, which I thought was a great addition.

Playing multiplayer is also an option as you can expect, and you can play as any of the characters that you’ve unlocked with each milestone of lums and teensies you’ve collected, and you can also collect them by these cool scratch off cards that you get in your suitcase, called Lucky Tickets. It’s fun chaos and you’ll enjoy it up until you decide to chastise your friends for being awful at the game, to which they’ll reply by saying that they don’t own it, “pretend” that they didn’t mean to punch you off a ledge and kill you, and you’ll both quietly resent each other for the rest of the day.

So the game has a definitive edition on the Switch and it’s available for basically every other console and it’ll probably get remastered or re-released at some point because that’s the world we live in now and everything is remastered. So what I’m saying is that if you don’t own it, pick it up and enjoy. Get Origins, too. Games like this belong in everybody’s collection.