Rayman Legends

In the world of no-frills 2D platforming, there are three clear leaders in my opinion. There’s Mario Maker, although with it being a level editor it’s kind of its own thing. There’s Donkey Kong with Returns and Tropical Freeze. And finally, there’s my favorite: Rayman.

Rayman Legends is an excellent 2D platformer. It is polished to the nth degree, has plenty for completionists, and innovates on the genre. The game also comes with more than half of the levels of Rayman Origins (as they clearly use the same engine so they just plopped them in as extras). Because of that, you might as well just pick up Rayman Legends instead of Rayman Origins.

But this game has everything you want from Rayman: weird kooky worlds, great platforming, goofy characters. There’s even these bonus music levels where the platforming is all set to the music. They’re wild, never played anything like it.

The controls for Rayman are great. Not too slippery, and you can easily perform pretty complicated fluid actions. This is most noticeable in the chasing missions in Rayman Origins which are absurd marathons as the world crashes around you. They’re hard but enjoyable because your controls are so tight.

The art for Rayman is always this exaggerated cartoony style and the music always works well. It’s all very fun and silly.

Rayman Legends is a top notch 2D platformer. If you like games like Donkey Kong and 2D Mario, Rayman is better and cheaper in my opinion. It’s good stuff, and the fact that it comes with most of Rayman Origins is icing on the cake.