Backlog Beatdown: Manning the Rays with Rayman Legends

Rayman: Legends was one of the first games I owned for the Nintendo Switch when I had it for Christmas last year and it is by far the game that I’ve played the most on it since. I’d been aware of the franchise since the ‘90s, but Legends is the most recent iteration of the platforming series with a surprising amount of longevity.

It looks chaotic but is really well paced.

Rayman: Legends is a puzzle-platformer, concerning the titular hero Rayman, his detached limbs and several of his friends as they battle across platforming level to free the Teensies from the nightmares and the Dark Teensies. It sounds mad and it absolutely is, but a fantasy-based game always benefits from breaking free from the Tolkien-esque western fantasy that is the staple of many current games. It’s been released on every major platform since the 7^th generation and is well worth a look on whatever system you own.

I describe the game as a puzzle-platformer but it’s remarkable how Rayman: Legends manages to, for the most part, keep those two aspects of it separate. You can get from one side of the level to the other, defeat enemies, handle some platforming sections and beat the game that way. Or you can take your time, explore the world, find all the secret entrances and solve the puzzles within if you want to complete as much of the game as you can. Certain of the platforming sections have their own gimmicks that need to be used to beat the level; sometimes there are light puzzles and sometimes you get a long-ranged attack for the level, but by and large, it’s standard stuff. It works because the game handles so well. All your abilities are either available to you at the start of the game or are handed to you at certain levels – no levelling up, or better characters; if there is a problem, the solution is within the level and the abilities you have. The controls are fluid and responsive, and the level design is on point, allowing for some spectacular platforming and some challenging sections without becoming too difficult. The immediate aim is to get to the end of the level, but there are bonuses available for collect a certain number of Lums and rescuing all the Teensies. You need to do at least some of the latter to progress, but this shouldn’t stand in your way.

This invasion level took me a long time...

The game mixes things up mechanically by adding some variation to the level parameters. The most obvious of these are the invasion levels, where you must complete certain sections of levels within a minute – and preferably forty seconds to rescue all the Teensies strapped to fireworks. These require a different frame of mind and some precision-platforming and can be frustrating – but the payoff for beating them is even more fun for that! Brilliantly, there are a set of “music” levels, where Rayman becomes a rhythm game – you control the game as normal, but the level and music are designed in such a way that your jumps and attacks must be in time with the music in order to progress. It wouldn’t work if that was the whole game, but they are a lot of fun when you play them!

There's all sorts of post-game content -
if you want to unlock it.

The graphics are gorgeous; cartoony art styles age very well and the backgrounds are beautiful. The soundtrack is good as well, notwithstanding the slightly irritating squeaky voices on certain tracks. Every Rayman game I’ve played has looked and sounded well, and without any obligation to put an iteration of the game out every year, it’s given itself enough time to find its feet and come up with a style of gameplay that really works well for this generation of gaming. The Nintendo Switch is the perfect system for a game like this – you can pick it up for half an hour, do a few levels and put it down again.

I don’t know how many people would see Rayman: Legends through to the end, but anybody should be able to pick up this game and have some fun with it. It’s a charming game in a gaming world that needs its colour and wit – without it or it’s player base taking themselves too seriously.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Last Week's Games: Monster Hunter World, Murder in the Alps, Takenoko

Three things to mention this week:

They don't present a massive challenge,
but they're hard to find!

I’ve been playing Monster Hunter World on the PlayStation 4. This is the first Monster Hunter game I’ve ever played, and at this point I’m not sure what to make of it. It seems to be a role-playing game that involves hunting monsters on an island for research; that’s the basic plot. But there’s a lot going on with it, namely upgrading your equipment from parts of the monsters you have hunted, as well as the usual levelling-up progression. I’ve had a decent time with it so far, the combat system is interesting and the world is beautiful, although the most significant challenge it’s offered to me so far has come in the form of the mission where I have to kill twenty Vespoids – and that was mainly because that was the only mission where there was a real possibility of over-extending the 50-minute time limit, as I had to spend a lot of time looking around the map looking for the things!

Apart from that, the main thing I’m having to battle is the game’s insistence on being an online MMO-like experience. I haven’t got PlayStation Plus – I don’t play the kind of games that would make it worth my while. Unfortunately, Monster Hunter World doesn’t seem to want to let that go, assumes it’s connecting to PlayStation Plus when you boot it up, and even when you bypass all of that, it still talks up the multiplayer content as part of the game. Sorry, but MMORPGs are not my thing at all – if I had a group of friends who wanted to play one then maybe but playing with some random people who want to do it a lot quicker than I like to pace myself doesn’t appeal to me at all.

This one is off the... no. No. That's too obvious.

I came back to Murder in the Alps on my mobile last week too. Near to the start of the year I was playing the first run of mysteries, and I thought I’d have a go with the second. It’s basically Murder on the Orient Express – The Game, and I was engaged enough to want to get to the end of it, though the fact that it’s a hidden object game requires some suspension of disbelief. If the character has found the item she’s looking for, why does she keep looking for the other twelve? It’s like that thing people say when they’ve found something they lost: “Always the last place you look.” One might reasonably wonder if they keep on looking after they’ve found whatever they lost. In this game, that’s more or less what you’re doing!

A game about growing Bamboo, with a cute panda.
What's not to like?

The final game I played this week was a board game: Takenoko. This is a game in which you must build a garden for a panda to live in. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually really good – you have to build up the different colours of the garden in a certain configuration, grow a certain amount of bamboo in a certain place, and have the panda eat a certain set of bamboo in order to score. I played it with Kirsty, and I’ve said it before but it’s always a sign of a well-designed game when the gap between your first turn and learning how to play the game is relatively small. It only took us a few goes, and we were building gardens according to our cards, and trying to have the panda eat certain types of bamboo, this that and the other. I won in the end, but only by a point. Kirsty realised quite late in the game that her scoring cards were relatively low, where as most of mine were mid-range, which gave me more points. It was too late for her to do anything about it by then, but I considered afterwards how looking for a lot of low-scoring points cards might be a viable strategy with three or four players. I suspect that you wouldn’t want to get bogged down with higher-scoring points cards when your opponents have three or four completed ones already!

That was it for this week, I’m a little short of time next week so we’ll see what I can get done!

Last Week's Games: Rayman, Call of Duty and Spyro

I haven’t been very well this week, mainly with a cold but it nonetheless drags you down! So, with a very busy week, and in a state of almost constant exhaustion, my time for playing games was limited for the first half, and heavy for most of Monday where I refused to do anything else. Because of that, I managed to beat two of them. They were: Rayman Legends on my Switch and Call of Duty: Classic on the Xbox 360.

This level took a few goes!

I’ve talked about Rayman Legends on this blog enough times for you to know I’ve been enjoying it, and I’d rather reserve any additional remarks I have on the matter for the review. I will, however, say that it is nice to still be having fun with a game with the post-game content, and in games like this, getting to the end is only half the battle! It’s one of the few games I have a hope of achieving 100% completion on, and if I’m still having fun on the journey, one wonders why not.

Seen one bombed-out ruin, seen them all...

Call of Duty: Classic was a different matter. I bought this game in 2013, I think. (It was somewhere within the bracket of buying the Xbox 360 in 2012 and making a habit of keeping track of what games I was buying, which was 2014-2015.) I’d probably thought at some point that if everybody else was playing Call of Duty by then, I might as well play it too, and given that I almost obsessively had to play games in sequence at that point in my life (still do, though I’m less finnicky about it now!) I was always going to start from the first one and work my way up. Never mind that, at the time I bought it, Black Ops 2 was out, Ghosts wasn’t far away and the part of the game that everybody liked – the multiplayer – dies as the yearly sequel spawns; I wanted to play through those campaigns! If I’d have known at the time it would take me over six years to get through even one of them, I might not have bothered. Nonetheless I managed to get to the end of the first Call of Duty game. It was OK. It’s showing its age now, obviously. It’s playable enough, but brutally hard in places and some of it feels quite cheap. However, I’m rather smug to be able to say that I got through the second half of the game without using the Lean function even once. This was because I only remembered it existed when I checked a Wiki to find out how in the world you are supposed to get all the achievement points by beating the game on its hardest difficulty setting – apparently this is a key skill for most of it, though it won’t help in certain “turret” situations, and “that” level in Russia where you somehow have to hold a building for four minutes. I was also surprised to learn that it was originally a PC game, and not, as I had previously thought, a port of Call of Duty: Finest Hour, which I owned for the Xbox at one point but traded in.

There's a secret room behind him...

Earlier in the week I carried on with Spyro the Dragon, beating the Beastmakers levels – not without some help from a guide for those last few gems; I’m not looking to get bogged down – and did the first level of the Dream Weavers, which I found quite colourful and endearing! I haven’t got much further than that though as my attention drifted over to Call of Duty, which sounds bad but let me explain: Kirsty’s PS4 is in our living room, my Xbox 360 is in our bedroom. Noticing I wasn’t well, Kirsty convinced me to come to bed where it was warmer and play some games there. The original plan was to play some co-op games but when all the Xbox Live Arcade games I’ve been saving for co-op turned out to need a separate profile in order to play them in co-op mode, I moved swiftly on! Kirsty didn’t seem to mind watching me getting killed in CoD over and over again, so no harm done.

Last Week's Games: Spyro, Rayman Legends and Horus Heresy: Legions

This week, I’ve mainly been playing Spyro the Dragon on the PS4. I mentioned last week that I’d put it on mainly to play a game I didn’t mind my daughter watching, but she really enjoyed playing it as well. But I’m having a fine time playing it; the levels are easy enough to get through and I rarely die through losing to the enemies (falling in to water is much more common,) but the real challenge of the game lies in obtaining all the collectibles and looking around the level for those, while a little off-pace at times, is a lot of fun.

I'm up to the Beast makers level at the moment...

It’s nice to be able to play Spyro now because I wouldn’t have touched a game like this back when I owned a PlayStation. I was more interested in the fighting games, military shooters and extreme sports titles were just coming in then as well; those were the games I tended to play back then. It turns out I missed out on quite a lot, because games like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot are very competently-designed games that had a much to offer and have aged – or at least have been re-mastered – a lot better. I doubt going back and playing the games that were cutting edge at the time would be the same experience now!

One remark I find myself making a lot about games I get to the end of is that nothing beats good level design and a solid core gameplay loop, and Spyro certainly has that. It doesn’t necessarily have a lot of progression in it – there’s no rewards in the game that develop the character, and such rewards as there are come in the form of collectable art – but far from enjoying Spyro in spite the static character, I enjoy it because of him. The fact is, “How do I get past this level?”, “How do I reach those gems?”, and “How do I complete this part 100%?” become very different questions when the answer lies in the abilities you start the game with. If charging an enemy doesn’t work, try a different attack. If you can’t find all the gems, look around again – they’re somewhere, and you can reach them if you look in the right place. After twenty years of levelling up and buying skill points, it is a refreshing change of pace – one that was there all along in the vast majority of the games I was playing prior to that!

Pigs might fly...

The same is true for the other game I managed to get some time with this week – Rayman Legends. As a puzzle platformer it has a similar divide: A platforming game that you can get all the way through, and a puzzle game for those who want to find all the collectables. I’m nearly at the end of the main campaign; I’m up to the last boss, which I probably would have beaten but I had to go back to work. After that, there’s plenty of post-game content; there’s a whole lot of additional levels I’ve unlocked, and some of the Teensies got missed along the way so there’s some levels I’ll have to do again. I couldn’t have picked a better game to do it with really – Rayman’s probably the best game I’ve got right now for a pick-up-and-play mentality, and with it being on the Switch of all consoles, I can dip in and out whenever I want without having to worry too much about plot continuity or any of it.

New faction: Orphans of War.

Finally, I had a go at Horus Heresy – Legions. It’s a little odd with this game now because while I feel no great desire to be playing it at the moment, I need to play it now and again to remain in my warrior lodge; there’s an expectation that we gain at least 30-50 points per week or we get kicked out. It’s fair enough; you don’t want a lodge full of dead accounts, but it does mean I’m only barely engaged.

The other games have taken a back seat for now; I find myself tied up in work and family commitments including my first musical performance in a while. We’ll see about next week!

Backlog Beatdown: Going into the breach with Into the Breach

I picked up Into the Breach roughly a year ago, having been made aware of it by the adverts on the Steam info page for FTL: Faster Than Light (both games have the same developer,) and an article on Rock Paper Shotgun where Into the Breach was at the top of its list of the 50 Greatest Strategy Games. I was intrigued by the idea that a game stripped back to the essentials of what makes a strategy game should be such a compelling experience.

Artillery blasts are always fun...

Into the Breach is an absolutely brilliant game. It is a turn-based strategy game where you control a squad of three “mechs,” who have gone back in time to free what is left of the planet from the Vek, an alien race of giant insect-like monsters who are destroying what remains of the planet’s population. The game presents you with four themed islands, which have several stages you must get through in order to clear the island and defeat the boss – usually a variation on an enemy you’ve already fought with more health and a different colour palette. The mission takes place on a 16x16 square grid and is usually quite simple: Stop the Vek from destroying too many civilian buildings, as they are forming a power grid that powers your mechs. What’s great about the battle system is that your mechs move then attack – the Vek attack, then move, then telegraph their next attack. Once you realise that your attacks move the Vek when they hit, you discover that this is your opportunity to strategically plan your moves so that the enemy does as little damage as possible. If enough of the power grid and at least one of your mechs is still operational at the end of four or five turns, you win the battle.

Don't think I've used this weapon before...

Variety is added to the missions by completing additional objectives: Protect specific buildings, destroy certain parts of the environment, avoid killing a ‘Volatile’ Vek that will explode if it takes enough damage are just a few. Your reward for completing these is either more power to your grid, or reputation points that can be spent at the end of an island to kit out your mechs. Once you’ve cleared at least two islands, you can attack the Vek on their base island, and if you can beat that mission you win the game. This mission scales in difficulty based on how many islands you’ve beaten, so you can’t fully level up your pilots and kit out your mechs and hope for an easier time – it’ll be a challenge either way! The game takes an hour to two hours to beat, and there is a plethora of stuff to unlock as you’re going along; I’ve beaten the game, but it will take much longer than that to complete!

The Final Mission is a blast!

The graphics are of a 4^th/5^th (console) generation pixel art style; it doesn’t look particularly special, but it will still look that good in ten years! The sound effects are of a similar standard, with the exception of the soundtrack. The music in this game is wonderful; it strikes the balance of being atmospheric and ambient enough to support the game without getting in the way of the action, but memorable enough to stick in the mind long after you’ve finished playing. Subset Games have a very talented composer in Ben Prunty!

Into the Breach is an excellent game with a lot to offer. While the fact that it is a turn-based strategy game might limit the appeal initially, its presentation makes it accessible to most people. The interface is fine; there’s very little clunk and it doesn’t take you long to figure out how everything works. There is a deeper plot than the one suggested, but apart from the fact that most of the characters have quite distinct personalities, you’re left to discover the intricacies of the plot on your own. The game allows you to uncover its weapons, upgrades and ideal paths at your own pace, and your reward for doing so is addressing the challenges the game presents using whatever option it gives you on each run. A fine game, and one that everybody should at least try.

Final Score: 5/5: Beyond excellent. 
 

Last Week's Games: Arena, Fire Pro Wrestling World, Spyro the Dragon

Larger than it looks...

I carried on playing Arena and X-COM: UFO Defense, but the problem with both is that they were developed during a time before games were paced and balanced at the level we expect them to be today, and I found them to be frustrating more than anything else. Arena is looking like it’s going to be a long slog indeed. I had forgotten that the first major area where there is a plot-related quest – Fang Lair – is in Hammerfell, and because I am a Wood Elf and therefore started the game in Valenwood, I need to travel across both continents before I find what I’m looking for. On the one hand, you can fast-travel from the very start. On the other, if you try to travel further away than the next town, you’ll be killed before you get there and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. The result is that I’ve got a long way to go before I can move the plot along and will likely never get there without a substantial amount of scum-saving. The fact that having more save files appears to increase the likelihood of the game crashing is doing nothing to improve this! I’m having fun, but I’m not likely to see it through until the end.

Strewth, a triple threat cage match!

I carried on with Fire Pro Wrestling World, which I’m finding addictive and a lot of fun. I’m still working my way through the Mission Mode, which is a good way to learn the key mechanics of the game but some of the match stipulations are rather odd, and I’ve had to go online to find out how to do it as the game doesn’t explain it to you. The one I remember is where you must win a Cage match having done a diving attack from the top of a steel cage. Even getting to the top of the cage without being interrupted takes a fair amount of work, and then you have to know where to do it and what button makes the attack – you only get one shot, and if you miss, you’ll be helpless on the floor as your opponent climbs the cage uninterrupted! The match I’m stuck on now is the one where you must let your tag team partner win the match. This is quite difficult to do as your partner doesn’t appear to be able to hold his own against your opponents, so you must do most of the work in beating them – but they’re pretty tough!

Dragoooon!

I had a go with Spyro the Dragon on the PlayStation 4. Kirsty bought this game roughly a year ago and hasn’t had a huge amount of time to play it. I played it because I wanted to be playing a game that I didn’t mind my daughter seeing when she woke up after her nap. But I really enjoyed it. It’s easy enough to play without getting stuck, (although apparently it gets tough later – I’m only at the second world!) and the bulk of the challenge is provided by collectables, which is where I’ve spent most of my time with it so far. I also liked Spyro, with his Sonic the Hedgehog-style ‘90s ‘tude. Having grown up in a time where pop culture was the domain of larger-than-life cartoon characters, it left me in a nostalgic haze, and was a refreshing change from the super-serious RPG characters or shooters. Speaking of my daughter, when she eventually woke up, she wanted to play, and even though she doesn’t have the dexterity to handle 3D controls yet, the game isn’t particularly challenging in the early stages and she had a fine time running around opening treasure chests.

With my hobby games, I spent some time in Phoenix Games while having my car fixed and started painting my Chaos Raptors in Black Legion colours, I’ll show you all when I’ve finished! I’ve also developed what I hope are some horror-based adventures for Dungeons and Dragons; short ones that will fit in to one or two gaming sessions but are paced well enough to give an interesting game to players wanting something a little different. I hope I get to run them at some point!