Saturday, 21 November 2015

Rayman Legends (Xbox ONE)

Many games have taught me lessons over the course of my gaming lifetime. Rule number is to avoid anything associated with EA and if you are ever in a situation where this is unavoidable (Mass Effect for example) make sure you finish it within eight months of release to avoid them screwing you in the ass.

Rayman Legends taught me never to let anyone play on my profile and to password protect my profile in case they log on when I’m not there and unlock a random achievement forcing my massive OCD to kick in and make me finish the game.

Rayman Legends involves Rayman (and his friends once you unlocked them) going into various paintings to rescue Teensies, some kind of weird blue creatures. You also have to beat the dark creatures who were responsible for imprisoning them. The levels are in 2D sidescrolling format but despite this, finding all the Teensies on one run through can be quite challenging.

Aside from the main levels, there are also bonus levels that require you to race through as quickly as possible, either killing enemies or being chased by a wall of fire. These are some of the more challenging aspects of the game and take a lot of practice to get right.

The cartoony graphics are in keeping with the fun nature of the game and to be fair to it, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. When you are racing through a castle jumping and sliding in rhythm to Black Betty, it can’t really get any better can it?

There are two other aspects to the game outside of the main painting levels. The first of these is a multiplayer mini-game called Kung Foot where you have to kick and punch a ball into an opponent’s net . The other consists of daily and weekly challenges which see you compete against the entire Rayman community for trophies. You unlock these as you play for a total of 4 challenges, two dailies and two weeklies.

A point on the music. Pushing for 100% completion of this one will have you listening to the in game music over and over again... however, I never started finding it irritating which is very strange because any other game that has over 70 hours of gameplay would have me spitting in fits of rage and reaching for the mute button.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

This takes a long time to 100% and will have you doing the challenges long after completing the main game. Most of the achievements can be encapsulated by striving for 100% completion of the main game objectives. This involves unlocking all the Barbarian Princesses, saving all the Teensies and reaching the Lum target in each level.

The hardest part of this is completing the invasion paintings. These are basically timed events and reaching the Lum targets in some of them is a real challenge. It does feel genuinely rewarding for getting through these as most of time I was within a second of failing when I finally succeeded.

Kung Foot has one achievement associated with it for winning one game. This can be done in local co-op so if you have two controllers it’s a real easy one.

Multiplayer

Now, I’ve categorised the challenges as multiplayer because despite you playing alone, you will need to have friends on your list to get some of the achievements and you have to beat a large portion of the community to get the others.

There are several types of challenges that you will be given. Some involve collecting as many Lums as possible without dying or getting as far as you can in some levels without dying. Others involve you having to get to a certain point as quickly as possible or collecting a set amount of Lums as quickly as possible.

Looking to the achievements themselves, you have to win a gold, silver and bronze cup from a challenge which is easy enough to do once. You also have to beat 30 of your friends’ times. However, if you have one friend on your list and they set a rubbish score on a challenge, you can simply replay the challenge over and over until you beat that same score thirty times. I’m not sure if this was the intention though but I haven’t seen any patches to change it while I was playing the game.

Now, after you have done all this you will most likely have two achievements left. One is for gathering 1 million Lums and the other is for reaching the final level of awesomeness. If you are going for the full 100%, you will get the Lums whilst striving towards awesomeness so I’ll focus on the last one.

Assuming you haven’t done any challenges after playing the main game and getting all the trophies there, you will need somewhere in the region of 1,800 points to reach the final level. You get points for winning cups which, after you have completed the game, are only available from the challenges. You get 1 point for bronze, 5 points for silver, 10 points for gold and a whopping 50 points for a diamond cup. As you can probably work out, this will take a while to do and that’s even before breaking down the percentages for obtaining the cups.

The top 90% of people who complete challenges on that day will earn a bronze. The top 50% will get silver; the top 20% gold and the top 1% will be awarded with the elusive diamond trophy. Even if you are amazingly awesome and get 14 diamonds for the daily challenges and 2 for the weekly ones that still only means 1,200 points for a week. That means you can complete the game in 1 and a half weeks if you are ridiculously good. I managed to get a really impressive one diamond trophy during my entire time playing the game which means I really suck. The more realistic goal is to aim for golds and even if you manage to get all golds, it will still take nearly three months to get the points required for the achievement. It took me 155 days to complete the entire game so I’m not quite at ‘all gold’ standard!

Downloadable Content – N/A

Rayman Legends was actually quite fun despite the fact I was railroaded into playing it. The challenges are one hell of a grind but they are at least varied which means you will more often than not have something different to do on it every day. I won’t be playing another Rayman game for a while now though – I’ve had more than my fair share!

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