Rayman Origins

This game is super fun, Rayman is such a silly guy running and jumping around with his iconic sidekick Globox, saving pink creatures with ponytails, stroking Polokus' hairy and scrumptious beard, and last but not least, turning the enemies into deviantart inflation fetish. This game is so great the artstyle, the music, the voice acting, the amount of screentime the nymphs get, the everything, i'd say it's the perfect platformer game ever made.

[h3] Pure, distilled happiness. [/h3] Rayman Origins takes the beauty of the original and adjusts the difficulty so you can actually enjoy it. The game is pure, childlike happiness and thrill - and belongs in a similar conversation as Celeste and Super Meat Boy. The visuals are the closest thing to an animated cartoon I’ve seen, and can only be matched by the recently released Mouse: P.I. for Hire, released a full 14 years later. Every asset is meticulously hand drawn in sharp, ultra high resolution and downscaled to create dense detail with no jagged edges to speak of. The smart interplay of colours helps support the gameplay: background assets are dark and slightly desaturated, while the foreground remains bright and colourful. This means the shear level of detail, alongside limited particle effects, ensures the visuals never become a distraction to the platforming. This is the best looking game that can also run on 1.5GB RAM and a 8600GT. My first Rayman experience was getting annihilated in the original PS1 game. I’d cast my eyes across the beautiful looking levels in the back of the box, and grow solemn that I’d never get anywhere near them. Rayman Origins is much more tame and forgiving experience. Death works similar to Celeste, miss a jump and you’re quickly back at the start of the section. There are no lives, except from an occasionally embarrassing “Are you sure you want to stay?” screen that appears if you die repeatedly in quick succession (shame!!). The difficulty curve is gentle, but there is challenge towards the back end. The final level, unlocked by collecting treasure chest gems, is one of the hardest in platforming - but this is pitched as a purely optional skill test and isn’t required to see the main ending. Gone are the spikes and death trips around every corner in the original, and unlimited retries remove nearly all frustration. Rayman’s movement is gentle and forgiving, but you might feel a slight floatyness compared to other indie platformers. Rayman still needs a few miliseconds to animate his movements, but the levels generally don’t require frame-perfect movements outside of jumping so it rarely becomes an issue. I did find, however that Rayman’s glide can be quite sticky and - when you push the game’s movement tech to its limit - I found he can refuse to hover in quick succession. It would have been nice to have achievements in this PC release, but other than that and some occasional floaty movement, Rayman Origins is near perfect and I’d heartedly recommend to any 2D platformer fan.

I grew up with ray man and this games brings me tears to my eyes the gameplay is smooth dispite being an oldish game (Btw rember to change keybinds)