Rayman Origins: A Diamond In The Crap

Rayman Origins’ appearance on Xbox 360 highlights a poor platform generation

Rayman Origins is, without question, the finest, most enjoyable platform experience available on 360. Bursting at the seams with artistic brilliance thanks to its publisher’s UbiArt framework, it assaults players with an array of concepts wider than the gap between Rayman’s hands.

From the world’s first mosquito shmup to gliding through a skyline filled with clouds and ponytails, it’s quirkiness par excellence, with few moments demanding precisely the same skills of players to progress.

Rayman Origins: A Diamond In The CrapFeaturing solid physics as well suited to steady exploration as barrelling through stages like patience is going out of fashion. Musically too Rayman Origins is perfectly judged, coming in somewhere between LocoRoco and Sonic The Hedgehog, making anything other than happiness an impossibility.

Quaintly, its underlying story takes place because Rayman and his buddies managed to annoy an old woman, the resulting hours of gameplay suffering from no unusual spikes in difficulty, or drop in satisfaction at seeing each stage beaten and your totals totted up.

Adventure platform gaming – and no, N+, ‘Splosion Man and Super Meat Boy don’t count – has suffered perhaps the most barren hardware generation ever – at least so far as Microsoft is concerned, if not the industry generally. The extent to which Rayman Origins lies ahead of Kung Fu Panda, de Blob et al really cannot adequately be expressed by mere words.

Neither, though, can the abyss lying between this and the exercise in joined-up thinking and boundless creativity found within each Super Mario Galaxy. Regardless of their appearance on (spit) another format, this is undoubtedly where the industry standard currently lies.

While Ubisoft’s title attempts to overwhelm its players with a torrent of concepts that are as swiftly introduced as they are dismissed, Nintendo’s work constantly riffs upon itself, reintroducing almost forgotten concepts for further exploration, like a good comedian tying together their otherwise disconnected set of gags. This is where the difference lies – in that small sparkle of cohesion.



Despite its beautifully realised worlds, capacity for enjoyable replay value and, well, ability to leave players with a massive grin on their faces, the pick ‘n mix counter feel never fades. Or, to render our argument less poncey for a second, there’s a huge array of ideas on show here, but only a couple you’ll never have seen before.

So, this is still the most enjoyable platformer on 360 – by an appreciable margin, in fact – but it’s a title earned almost by default. Though its art direction is indeed wonderful, throwing up moments of stupefying beauty more often than your average platformer doles out collectables, underneath it’s as old school as flat top haircuts and parachute pants.

 





Video// Youtube
Article,photographs and video taken entirely from the web http://www.360magazine.co.uk/