Rayman M Review

I noticed that the racing games were really hard. Your enemies are not quite stupid, and the levels are tricky and treacherous. If you want to achieve a good score, you will first have to know the track by heart, all its short-cuts and obstacles, concentrate real hard, pray for victory and then see what happens. I can only say that by the time I managed to win the easiest race, I had already won all the battle levels in the game! And I thought I was a good platform player.

Both the multiplayer and single player mode feature several leagues (levels of difficulty): Beginner, Advanced, Expert and Extreme, and each of those contains six levels (3 racing and 3 battle levels). When you first start the game, you will only be able to access the Beginner singleplayer league, and as you win one game after another, you will unlock the higher leagues in both modes. Even though the leagues have obviously been designed to differ in difficulty, I did not notice any variations in the AI in the single player mode, but I have to admit that changing the difficulty level in the multiplayer mode severely alters your opponents' aggression.

There are altogether eight characters (Rayman, Globox, Teensies, Razorbeard, Razorbeard,s wife, Tily, Henchman 800 and Henchman 1000), five of which will be accessible from the very beginning, and the rest will become available as you progress through the game. They look different, but their characteristics are completely identical (at times I thought that Razorbeard moved a bit faster than others, but I turned out to be wrong). I guess that some players won't like the characters being all the same, but I guess that the programmers simply didn't want to complicate matters too much. The upside of this approach is that you will be able to change your character and hence the appearance of the game before any given race without having to adapt to a character's specific tactics first... And I must say that thee characters and their animations look simply fantastic. It was a real pleasure trying all of them out, just to see how they run, jump, fall and do the 'heli'-jump. Globox will, for instance, inflate like a balloon, the Henchman has a jet-pack on his back, Teensies will swirl around each other, etc. What I personally hated about the characters is that you get to fight both the good and evil characters. In previous Rayman games, all good characters used to stick together and now you see them shooting at each other. I mean, it was really a horrible feeling seeing Globox trying to kill Rayman.

As for the graphics, Rayman M uses the same engine as The Great Escape. Its greatest downside is the relatively small number of polygons used for depicting the surroundings. However, if you are not one of those people who are obsessed by the power off their GPU, I don't think that will bother you much. The well-drawn high-quality textures will more than compensate for the lack of polygons. The engine does date a couple of years back, which means that everything will run smoothly on any half-decent machine. The developers stated that they recommend a 700Mhz rig simply because the split-screen mode tends to be a bit more demanding. The thing that surprised me was the fact that a game like this comes on two full CDs. The second CD turned out to be entirely filled with sounds, so I certainly doubt anyone will find the 3000 samples they produced for this game insufficient.

Finally, it is up to you to decide weather you like Rayman in a role like this or not. I find it a real shame that a game based on a great quest-driven plot got a sequel, which is based solely on (slightly frustrating) action/arcade elements from the original. Not that I have anything against the arcade genre, its just that I hope that this is but a short experiment, and that Rayman would return to its original track...