Murfy's levels follow in the spirit of games like Lemmings or the recent Mario Vs. You like trial-and-error design and rote memorization, right? You can't properly complete the game without slogging through most of them, and it utterly destroys the experience.
Worse, Murfy's levels represent nearly half the game's content. They're clumsy, unimaginative, and generally not fun. I can't begin to describe exactly how much I hate these stages.
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What they settled on was a series of iOS-style stages featuring an autonomous character named Murfy. Since Legends was originally designed for Wii U, Ubisoft naturally felt compelled to add some platform-specific features to the game. These can be amusing - witness the lumbering beast that eventually stumbles into a pool of magma and gives a Terminator-style thumbs-up as he disappears into the flames - but more often than not they degenerate into the low-stakes trial-and-error philosophy that defines so much of the game.Īnd then there's Murfy, where the game bottoms out. The musical bonus levels aren't the only area where the game resembles an endless runner, and the further you advance into Legends' stages the more often platforming finesse gives way to high-speed chases that largely play themselves. The problem is that Legends' ideas don't always work on the contrary, they frequently fall flat on their face.
Jump, slide, swing, stomp, smash: Played properly, these stages become a breakneck musical performance, more theatre than game, but wholly satisfying. Essentially just "endless runner"-style minigames, these levels also double as rhythm games, with the music perfectly synced to every action you take. Without question, the highlight of the game comes in the form of the musical bonus stages you unlock at the end of each world. When Legends' ideas work, they do work brilliantly. There's a lot of "Sure, throw this in, why not?" but not much in the way of, "Does this work? Is this a good idea?" But what I don't get from Legends is any impression that the designers ever stopped having fun long enough to figure out how this mishmash of ideas should fit together properly. Rayman Legends gives the impression of a game whose designers had a lot of fun making it it's suffused with a genuine exuberance that you rarely see in projects from major publishers. Review copy was provided by the publisher. The game actually looks like this in motion. Infinite lives and generous checkpoints allow you to blunder through each new addition, but the introduction of every new element feels completely arbitrary and poorly thought-out. Yet the game rarely takes the time to roll out new additions properly, instead just plopping them down in front of you. New ways to play pop up constantly, with the rules guiding the action often changing from level to level. It's constantly throwing new concepts and mechanics into the mix, but there's no discipline to it, no restraint. And Legends excels at wild ideas and imagination.īut in many ways, that unbridled sense of creativity serves as the source of Legends' problems. Liveliness permeates every moment of the action, and even the inaction.
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though it does bear an unfortunate similarity to those overly precious Virgin America safety instruction videos ( the matador doesn't know how to use a seatbelt - how zany!). While it runs on the same UbiArt framework that powered Rayman Origins, the overall aesthetic incorporates a more natural, painterly style that helps make everything come off as less of a cheap Flash game. The game looks absolutely gorgeous, for starters.
Make no mistake, Legends gives you plenty to love. So why does this game feel like such a random, slapdash pile of interesting ideas in desperate need of more development time? When Ubisoft delayed Rayman Legends from spring to fall, I figured the upside would be that we'd receive a better, more polished end product.
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