LogFAQs > #965229014

Rayman Origins (Wii)

I'm not big on platformers. I think one of the reasons for this is that they weren't a huge part of my childhood. I had a Looney Tunes platformer, Action Man action platformer, and Super Mario Land for the Gameboy, and those were really my only experience with them growing up. I played a ton of the first Wario Land, but that was about it. I was never big into Mario games, so in a certain way I was kinda dreading playing this.

But I needn't have dreaded. This is a great game. The gameplay has a perfect smoothness to it. Mario and Sonic have a certain necessity for speed to their level design. Sonic especially cries out for it due to the nature of the main character, but even Mario feels wrong when you're taking your time and looking around and thinking about stuff. Rayman Origins finds the perfect balance between giving you the opportunity to take it slow and kind of take your time with jumps and figuring out what you're supposed to do, but also rewarding you by being able to go through the level fast, just in feeling. Rayman Origins feels great when you're going through a stage and you're jumping at just the right time, gathering all the Lums, holding your run when you need to, doing the wall jumps...it just feels good to play (well).

So in that sense it's somewhat unfortunate when this feeling falters later in the game. It start with the last level of the first group of stages, where you unlock the power to run on walls. This powerup never felt good to use to me. I always had a tough time figuring out exactly how the physics worked and when the game wanted you to wallrun and when it wanted you to walljump. But worse is that when the second group of stages gets unlocked, fatigue was settling in for me and the game took away its casual nature and made itself more punishing. The second group of stages rely heavily on a trial-and-error gameplay design, where the game actually expects you to die, just so you learn to jump/attack/... at that specific spot next time. While this a grating way to learn how to play a game anyway (Origins is pretty free with checkpoints, but still), for me personally, death shouldn't be an inherent part of the game design, so this kind of learning curve just frustrates me to no end. There were some hard levels, but I feel this game tested my patience more than my skill.

Technically, this game is great. I played it on a Wii via a HDMI-converter and I still thought it looked great, so I can't imagine how gorgeous it looks on an actual HD-console like the 360 or PS3 (or on a PC). Music-wise, this track is in it, what more could you want?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIGY62fZgN8