I cannot compare Rayman
DS to any of his older adventures: I haven’t played them. In one
respect this is a good thing, because most criticisms aimed towards
the game compare it to its N64, Playstation, and Dreamcast
incarnations, but on the other hand that leaves me able to compare
it to the only really comparable game I’ve played on this system:
Super Mario 64 DS.
You play as Rayman, a little dude
whose body, legs, and arms all float separately from each other. At
the beginning of the game you are informed that not only have pirates
captured you, but also these same pirates have shattered the heart of
the world into a thousand yellow “lums”. Whatever the hell those are.
The premise of the game is about par for the course for the entire
experience in that it’s light-hearted, goofy, and generally just fun.

Newcomers to the Rayman universe will
probably be reminded of titles like Banjo Kazooie or maybe
Conker’s Bad Fur Day because the humor is surreal and goofy in
much the same way. The first time you meet the Teenies, who are small
worm-like people that do little but argue and dance around, is an
experience. However, the semi-dark and almost oppressive feel that
most areas of the game give off genuinely offsets the light-hearted
tone of the adventure. That’s a relatively minor complaint but it does
affect the experience overall.
The way the game plays is intuitive –
for the most part. Rayman’s auto-targeting energy balls are fun to
use; he can jump and do a sort of hover-ish, helicoptery thing with
the best of them. You can upgrade his abilities as the game
progresses, and using these upgrades you can reach new areas to
explore. For the most part, everything you do in the game feels fairly
intuitive, particularly when you lock onto and strafe around an enemy.
Definitely a good thing.
Unfortunately, the biggest problems
with Rayman’s controls involve two of the most basic parts of it:
actually moving around and controlling the camera. In Mario 64
you can use either the D-Pad or the Touch Screen to move around, and
the same holds true in Rayman, but where Mario allows you to control
the speed of your movement with precision using the touch screen or
using a button on the D-Pad, Rayman does not give this luxury. The
touch screen interface isn’t sensitive enough to accurately control
the speed with which Rayman moves, and the D-pad is only capable of
making him move at full speed, with a delay between your
pressing and Rayman actually running. Ugh.
The camera’s actually a bigger problem
than movement, for me: the damn thing wanders everywhere at the most
inopportune times, and instead of giving you a way to adjust it, maybe
with the touch screen (ala Mario, again), Ubisoft has seen fit to
present you with no less than three buttons devoted to centering the
camera behind Rayman while he looks around or stands there or
whatever. Not only is that an inefficient use of buttons, a grave
enough sin by itself, but it also feels utterly unintuitive. Assigning
two buttons to rotating the camera at a fixed speed, and maybe one to
center it would have worked just as well. The camera sometimes manages
to get in the way of actual gameplay, which is a fault I can’t place
on many games – I’m the kind of person who never has problems with
cameras, no matter how wonky, simply because I can work around them.
In Rayman this sometimes is not the case.
Aurally, the game is something of a
treat – the music is appropriately trippy and lighthearted where it
needs to be, and in general evokes an emotion appropriate for the
situation. The garbled language used for spoken dialogue is
appropriately cute and vaguely reminiscent of various other adventure
games, though that shouldn’t exactly come as a surprise. That said,
sound effects are rather unvaried and genuinely bland in places –
especially when you consider how much of this crap you’re going to be
doing over and over again to collect a thousand yellow lums. Overall
it’s good, but for some reason the entire experience manages to feel
somehow dated.
Now, one major way in which Rayman DS
deviates from nearly every other portable adventure game ever made is
its saving system. Most offer you some way to save whenever you like,
or at the least every once in a short while. That is not the case
here: you only save by getting to the end of the massive world you’re
in, and this is not as easy as it sounds. This game’s levels are
massive, cavernous if you will, and literally chock full of
different things for you to do. Normally it would be difficult to
criticize a game for a point like that, but when it comes down to
choosing between saving your progress and getting to dinner on time,
Rayman himself starts looking like less of a priority. When you die on
the same challenge over and over and over again – and it will happen,
more than once – you’ll maybe want nothing more than the ability to
get off for a while and mull over a solution on in your head. This
simply is not possible, and that is bad.
That said, though, sometimes the
worlds being so huge is definitely to their benefit – beating them is
very satisfying, and rarely if ever will you find a game that offers a
sense of scale more vast and cohesive. Each world feels more or less
right, particularly for the way the story is set up. However, I get
the feeling that each world was supposed to be somehow cheerier, maybe
less dark – because sometimes dark they are, with muddy textures and
odd colors making for an entirely different experience than if the
tone had been as light for the level design as it was for the
characters and art and music.
The characters are all probably the
most outstanding part of Rayman: each of them possesses their
own brand of humor, and all of them are beautifully constructed and
(by comparison) lavishly detailed. Designs are creative and often very
original, on top of always being fun to look at. Some of them are
impressive if only because they’re so freaking weird, but they’re
still impressive.
I guess what you get out of Rayman
will be determined by what you want in the game. If you want a huge
adventure filled with interesting humor, funky music, and some
earnestly great level design, this is where it’s at. But if what
you’re looking for is more in the vein of a great handheld experience,
with graphics tailored to the platform, an interface that makes sense,
and a save system that caters to the fact that you’re really playing
on the go...I’m gonna have to say this is not, in fact, where
it is at.
Highs:
Lows:
-
Poor camera
-
Basically unused
touch-screen interface
-
Sluggish
controls in a game dependent on accurate running and jumping and
walking and creeping, what’s up with that
-
Save system that
doesn’t make sense on a handheld
-
Huge worlds can
actually be detrimental if you don’t want to be playing the game
for very long
-
Graphics
sometimes get muddy and make the game seem darker than it really
is
-
A thousand lums
is a LOT of lums
Final Verdict:
Overall, Rayman DS is
something of a disappointing experience. The worst part is that so
much of it is done right that you know the game could have been
great if given a little more polish, but the biggest problems
present themselves early and never go away. This game is like a
quilt made from really fine pieces but put together with razor wire:
it still cuts the bejesus out of you. There is enjoyment to be had
here, and for some people I imagine there’s quite a lot of it, but
it simply cannot compare to many other adventure games with which
more care was taken.
Overall Score: 6.5
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