Can We Let Mike Ancel Release Beyond Good and Evil 2 Now?
The platformer is a genre of video game that I don’t think we’ll ever see disappear. It’s simply too integral to the video gaming experience; since the very beginning of the medium it has persisted as both a challenging and fun way to tell a story. Some platformers focus more heavily on the difficulty level, mixing speed with platforms of varying degrees of difficulty to challenge the player and force them to live within the game’s world in order to master it. Others prefer ingenuity over difficulty, subverting the genre by adding abilities and techniques that it’s never seen before. Ubisoft‘s Rayman Origins does both very, very well.
Rayman has always struck me as a bit of an odd sell. He’s just, well, so weird. With odd central characters, a lot of studios make the mistake of trying to place him/her within a context that we can familiarize with. This often requires a heavy suspension of disbelief, and leads to players asking too many questions of the game as opposed to legitimately enjoying it. With Rayman Origins, this is never an issue. The world in which Rayman lives is at the same time immensely beautiful and insane. But in a good way. Rayman’s world is a place in which angry, arguing forks balancing lemon slices on their head act as a platform. A world inhabited by cute, singing little yellow sprites called Lums that help to release cute little pony-tailed pink sprites called Electoons from their cages. A world where anything seems possible, including the existence of a cat/ant/dog thing with no arms, legs, or neck.
The plot comes secondary to almost everything else in the game, but it breaks down as follows: a crabby old woman becomes angry after she’s forced to listen to Rayman and his pals loudly lounging around the forest they inhabit, so as punishment she releases an onslaught of monsters and imprisons the magical creatures of the world. Rayman is tasked with navigating the various worlds and releasing the aforementioned Electoons, a couple of nymphs and their friends. It’s pretty basic stuff, but you’ll quickly find yourself completely overlooking its lack of depth because you’re just having so much damn fun.
A Classic Platforming Experience With a Modern Twist
The gameplay fluctuates between fast, frenetic platforming, and timed jumps and maneuvers. For the first couple of worlds you can get away with navigating through each level while holding down the sprint button, but doing so will soon become the source of many a death. If I have any criticism to lobby at this game, it’s that its first 3 or 4 worlds feel stale. Visually, they’re beautiful and diverse, but your actions within them feel repetitive. Were it not for the setting, it wouldn’t be completely unreasonable to assume that you were still in the same first world over the course of the game’s first levels. But this soon becomes a non-issue; in fact, as you progress, the reason for this lack of variation soon becomes glaringly obvious.
For a platformer, Rayman Origins is a rather large game. I don’t quite think the $60 price tag is completely justified, especially considering the fact that we’ve had massive games like Skyrim release this year for the same price, but it was large enough that I didn’t feel at all cheated or ripped off at the end. A lot of platformers in the past have actually suffered from large playtimes. They run out of things for the player to do, and eventually the game becomes repetitive and boring. Rayman Origins combats this by making the first couple of levels function as a tutorial for all of your abilities, which are unlocked as you progress through the first couple of worlds, and then spends the rest of the game providing you with interesting scenarios that combine the use of those abilities. The strategy is troubling at first, but eventually it is the source of some of the most challenging and fun platforming experiences in recent memory.
All of this is backed by what is one of the best video game scores of the year. A lot of scores in gaming often take a backseat to its other aspects. It’s sad, but for the most part a gamer isn’t typically going to even notice the score, even if it is really great. Christophe Heral is a french film and video game composer (he’s worked with Ancel in the past on Beyond Good and Evil and its much-delayed sequel), and in his work on Rayman Origins he’s created a video game score that can’t possibly go unnoticed. Each new world you traverse is given identity by both its aesthetic style and musical backing. The score spans several genres, and enhances nearly every aspect of the game.
The Final Verdict
Rayman Origins is one of the best modern platforming experiences currently available. Through a mix of unique visuals, an engrossing score, and tight, refined gameplay mechanics, you’ll find yourself completely immersed within its cooky world. At $60, the game is a bit of a tough sell; not only is it a franchise that hasn’t been around for quite a while (and wasn’t even all that popular to begin with), but a 2D platformer for $60 is a hard thing for anyone to commit to, especially in a world where the scope and size of games has become so vast. But, when all is said and done, and Rayman has triumphed over the evil underworld-dwelling grandma that opposes him, you’ll find yourself wanting more. Not because the game is short, but instead because it’s just so fun. If you’re a fan of platformers, or artistic games in general, Rayman Origins is the game for you.
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