With the chance of any Mario game appearing outside a Nintendo console being less than absolute zero, and no recent Sonic games worth mentioning (sorry, Sonic fans. All 3 of you.), it falls to Rayman to carry the platform-game torch for the Xbox. Luckily for us, through both Legends and his previous outing, Origins, he has revealed himself to be a most worthy torch-bearer.
The game has vague pretensions to having a story: there's the Glade of Dreams, where our heroes have been in a hundred year slumber. Friendly creatures known as 'Teensies' have been kidnapped, and you have been tasked with saving them: all 700 of them, to be precise. There's also...actually, who cares? The game certainly doesn't appear to, kicking you straight into the action and barely offering up any cutscenes for you to catch your breath. New levels and areas unlock on a regular basis, meaning you're never stuck with the same scenery and level-type for too long. With levels ranging from underwater seas complete with Bond-esque baddies firing laser guns, to quicksand levels where the next area you must reach slowly disappears before you, Legends keeps the challenge and most importantly the innovation ticking along. It also doesn't hurt that every level looks magnificent.
Ubisoft Montpellier has tweaked a few parts of the gameplay - certain levels require the assistance of a largely AI-controlled partner who with a tap of the 'B' button will remove otherwise unpassable barries, and even eat cake (it makes sense, trust me). Daily and weekly challenges - which for single-player games made nowadays must be a requisite - offer bonus challenges to those wishing to take a break from the main missions, with even tougher challenges unlocked the more you play. As an aside, as of writing this review, the leaderboards seem to indicate that I'm the only Irish player to have played these challenges, making me the leading Rayman player in these parts, an accolade I've always coveted.
Any issues are minor, and feel more like nit-picking then any real fault of the game itself. Moments of frustration when you find your self temporaily stuck are negated by the quick restart nature of the game: death only results in being placed back at the last checkpoint, which is never more than a few jumps away. Death may sometimes feel unfair, but then you realise you slightly mistimed your jump or didn't gather up enough speed, and the feeling of a perfect run washes away any of the pain you felt in achieving it. For those who own Origins already on the 360, paying full price for Legends may seem a bit steep, as Legends may feel as if it only attempts to perfect those previous elements, rather than reinvent them. However, the inclusion of 40 levels from Origins, unlocked sporidically throughout the game and revamped to match the new levels, makes this essential for anyone yet to be introduced to the series.
Legends picks up where its predecessor left off, with fluid platforming accompanied with some magnificent looking levels and a whole cast of magnificently daft characters. Have I mentioned how great it looks? This is a game that revels in its daft nature, and it is all the more charming and fun for it. With consoles at times saturated with serious, po-faced shooters full of brooding 'macho' men, or attempts to blur the lines between gaming and Hollywood in both spectacle and story, it is refrshing to play something that is pure, unadulterated fun at every point. Rayman arrives as a swift, limbless punch to their collective guts. This one is a TKO.
