It looks pretty, and there’s lots of it, and it works, but it isn’t earth-shattering. Ubisoft’s mascot platformer is free in May 2018 if you’re in PlayStation Plus.

Rayman Legends (PG)
Reviewed on PlayStation 4
Also available on PS3, PS Vita, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, Wii U
Copy purchased (PlayStation Plus subscription)

Rayman Legends is an old game. Not just in terms of its age- it was released in August 2013, before the Xbox One and PlayStation 4- but in terms of its approach to how it treats players. In 2018, we are leery of games that have endless collectables, and so-called “lucky tickets” that you can earn in-game; you need x number of the yellow collectables (Lums) to unlock new heroes and x number of the blue collectables (Teensies) to unlock new stages, and there are incentives to log in each day as more Lums are on offer from daily challenges and creatures that can be farmed. These kinds of features ring alarm bells in the age of mobile gaming, loot boxes and pay-to-win mechanics.

And yet, no microtransactions are in the game. Everything in Rayman Legends is earned in-game, and it never begs you for more money. There is no way to buy your way to the end of the game or the top of the leaderboards; it’s all extremely innocent.

Suffice to say the major publishers wouldn’t dare release it in that state today.

Rayman Legends is also not interested in wasting the player’s time. There are minimal loading times, and no limit to the number of attempts you can make on a level; you can be back in the action in under a second should you mess up. Cutscenes have no dialogue and are skippable after the first time you view them. None of the characters talk, other than the occasional cheer or grunt of exertion; in any case, there is no story to communicate other than “bad dudes have taken over these worlds, go rescue all the collectables and collect all the rescuables.”

In one way, though, that’s disappointing; the cast of dozens of unlockable heroes don’t have any characterisation or reason to be there other than to pad out the roster, or ensure that you have enough different-coloured Raymen to go around if you are playing in co-operative mode (the game allows 4-player co-op, like New Super Mario Bros.) As a result, the incentive isn’t really there to continue to play; if you’re just collecting enough Stuff to unlock all the things that are marked ‘locked’, you’re just playing to tick off a checklist. That’s administrative work, not fun.

The game itself is a fairly standard platformer. The levels are linear, so you go from left to right (and occasionally up and down) to liberate all the Teensies (or in French, Ptizètres, or little beings) and punch the monsters. There are springboards, and spiked obstacles, and the occasional level against the clock where you have to keep moving, but overall it’s not terribly innovative most of the time. Each level has one or two hidden doorways that house a puzzle, which liberates the Teensy royalty on completion. I mean, I guess they’re royalty. They have crowns.

The levels shown off in the trailers are much more imaginative; they tend to be boss levels (with bosses that take up the entire screen on occasion) that have their own mechanics to beat. These can be frustrating at times; the second one, for example, is a shoot-’em-up level but Rayman doesn’t handle like any shmup I’ve previously played (you can’t move while firing, but you also don’t lose altitude while firing). The controls otherwise are tight and responsive, and you’ll be pulling off intricate wall-jumps in no time.

If the boss levels are annoying, completing them rewards you with easily Legends’ most fun sections- musical levels that are played in time with a pop song or orchestral piece, where you sprint to the right and jump or punch on musical cues. These are really beautifully designed and fun to play, and I kind of wish we could get a Rayman rhythm-action platformer now that just uses that mechanic rather than just relying on plain old regular platforming. Unfortunately, the musical levels are few and far between; each ‘world’ has about 9 or 10 levels, and the musical stages are your reward for slogging through the rest.

There are about 120 levels in all, including some remastered levels from the even older Rayman Origins, and a few levels that get ‘re-invaded’ after you’ve completed them. Add in the daily and weekly online challenges- when the servers are stable enough to feed them to you- and a high price for the final unlockable hero, and there’s a lot of gameplay here even if you are repeating levels to grind for Lums. It just gets a bit too repetitive a bit too quickly for my liking. (If you’re looking for cheap achievements, this isn’t the place, either; PS4Trophies estimates it could take months to knock over enough challenges and get enough Lums to unlock everything.)

It’s hard to hate the game; artistically Legends is beautifully drawn, well animated, has a varied soundtrack that supports the action and doesn’t get on your nerves, and plays well. As stated above, it is also designed with respect for the players who’ve shelled out money for the experience; I had no issues with loading times or crashes (other than the daily challenge servers being a bit unresponsive at times). I just felt that there’s a lot of less-compelling stuff that you have to trudge through to get to the good stuff, and I don’t know whether the good stuff is enough to justify the trudging.

But it is free or at least, pretty cheap on other platforms given its age. And it’s worth checking out because as noted above, it’s the product of a bygone era- one where you bought a game and got the whole game.