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: 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!

Last Week's Games: My Game Buying Analytics

This edition of the blog is going to take a decidedly Non-Gamey tone, since very little of it is to do with playing games. Most of it is the analytics I have been flagellating myself with all week. I will put some game bits in the start, but if you aren’t interested in anything I’ve got to say about my large and probably insurmountable game collection you can close the web page after the next paragraph.

I carried on with my usual games of The Horus Heresy: Legions and Rayman: Legends; games that I use mainly to pass time between jobs and things I need to be doing but are fun nonetheless, if better enjoyed in short bursts than extended gaming sessions! I also had a go with Chaos Gate, trying to beat one of the optional levels without losing any Space Marines. I didn’t get very far with that one. Finally, I continued playing Wolfenstein 3D and, for reasons that will become obvious in a moment, managed to drive myself to beat it. The review will be coming up on Friday, but I will say as one last snide remark that, brutally difficult though that last level was obviously designed to be, if I hadn’t looked up the map on a guide and found that secret area, I’d never have got past the second room.

Something to aspire to?
Or an addiction-based problem?

Watching far too many YouTube videos has made me aware of a vast multitude of games that I want to at least try. I’ve always owned too many video games, but that fact has been kicked into overdrive once I discovered Steam and its Wishlist system. To explain, if you find a game you are interested in on the Store page you can add it to your Wishlist. At some point, a game will usually go on sale and you can get it for a significantly reduced price. When this happens to a game on your Wishlist, Steam will send you an email telling you so, tempting you to buy the game. Being able to buy a lot of games for a relatively small amount of money tugs at my addictive nature, and this is how I’ve ended up with several hundred of the things – many of which I have never played. The fact that I now have the option to do this on GOG does nothing to help this issue.

At some point last week, I decided to count my games. I already keep track of what games I own on an excel document, so it was simply a case of working it out from the numbers in the margin. Having counted them, I then decided to total how many of them I’ve played, how many of them I’ve beaten and how many I’ve completed 100%.

At the time of writing, I own 834 video games, have played 415 of them, beaten 106 of them and completed 34 of them. And that’s if I haven’t missed any of them. Also keep in mind that this doesn’t consider all the video games I have ever owned, as many of them went to trade-ins at some point. Some of them I managed to beat, some I didn’t, but at some point, I decided I wasn’t going to play them again and traded them; that information isn’t displayed here.

I had originally intended to display the graphs I’d done as a result of this, but when I’d finished writing the first draft of the blog and read it back along with the graphs, I really didn’t come out of it well at all. Suffice to say, I own too many video games and should play some more of them at least to the end credits! I’m not saying I will never display that information, but I’d rather do it at a point where I have something more positive to say about it, e.g. if next year shows any significant improvement in my spending and gaming habits. The final chart, where I ran the number of games I’d bought and beaten throughout the years, was a particular eye-opener, and I’m hoping to see an improvement in what it’s telling us for next year.

So, back to it!

Last Week's Games: Wordscape, Rayman, Spelunky and Persona 5.

This week’s been an interesting one. Probably the most notable thing that’s happened is that I had to have my laptop reset to factory settings. It was time for its yearly tune-up and there had been some things going wrong with it; I was told that the best thing to do would be to go for a factory reset. I backed up all the important information; anything that couldn’t be re-downloaded at some stage in the future. I had some faff when I got it back because some of the C++ redistributable files were missing and that got in the way of installing and running, among other things, GOG Galaxy, but I got that sorted and now I’m back up and running. Sort of.

Can you work out the third word?

I now have a blank slate, so to speak. I’ve bought more games for the PC then I’m ever going to fit on one hard disc, and I’ve recently been roughly 30% away from capacity and didn’t feel like pushing my luck by adding to the number of games I’d had installed. At this point, none of them are installed and I can start again from scratch. But like a child with too many toys on Christmas Morning, I don’t know which to play first! Maybe I’ll use this opportunity to play some games I bought but never installed, maybe I won’t. But it’s an interesting experience!

I have found time to play some other bits and pieces as I’ve been going along, though. I’ve made a discovery on my mobile, Wordscapes. If you haven’t played this then you’ve seen an advert for it; it’s the word game where you make several words out of six letters. I’ve been having a surprising amount of fun with this, as the answers are always there in front of you – you just need to know where to look. It’s also nice being able to ask my girlfriend for help, which she’s always happy to provide if she knows the answer too.

I’ve also been playing Rayman Legends on my Switch, when I’ve had the time. As I spent the first part of the week in London, I was thankful for the Switch’s portability! Apart from that there’s not much else to say; it’s one of those games where you can easily do a few levels at a time and leave it at that.

All the characters handle the same, but this one's got
a particularly impressive set of whiskers.

On a similar pick-up-and-play theme, I had a go at Spelunky on the Xbox 360. I’ve had this game for a while, but I haven’t played it much because I enjoyed Rogue Legacy more. But having played neither game for a while I found myself strangely engaged. I’m no better at it now, and only got as far as the Jungle (for the first time!) before something killed me straight away. But I’m glad I’m enjoying it!

Couldn't tell you what's going on here...

Finally, on the PS4, I played a game that I’ve owned for nearly a year and (mainly because I knew it was a long-form RPG that would need some time investment,) hadn’t got around to playing yet: Persona 5. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I wasn’t, in fact, going to have to wait ages for the game to install before I could play it, and was able to get started straight away. I played the first couple of hours of it and spent most of that time wondering what it was all about! It’s very Japanese in style, and there is nothing wrong with that, but it can be a little alienating if you’re not familiar with the culture. You play as a high-school student who, on going to his new school, finds himself between two worlds and must find a way to escape while dealing with the problems the alternative worlds present. That’s all I can say at this point as I didn’t get very far. The actual gameplay consists mainly of exploration and combat so far, and the combat is turn-based with certain enemies weak to certain kinds of attacks. But with the game free from the constraints of western RPGs, some of the combinations aren’t so obvious, and I have a feeling that this will be a lot of trial and error for me!

Last Week's Games: Crash, Rayman, Mordheim and Pathfinder

My face if I manage to 100% the game...

I began this week by playing a little more of Crash Bandicoot, trying to get some of the gems and relics. I wasn’t very successful! From what I understand, the game’s puzzle involves getting the coloured gems to open up some of the paths in the earlier levels in order to get all the crates. This is all well and good but in order to get the gem, you need to clear some of the most difficult levels in the game having smashed all of the crates and not dying even once. That is a pretty tall order, especially for a game I’ve already beaten, and while it would be lovely to get all the achievements, I have a feeling that will become more work than fun before too long. 

Haven't played any of the Murphy's Touch levels yet...

I carried on with Rayman: Legends on the Nintendo Switch; pick up and play games are a great boon to have in a busy life! It’s great that you can do a few levels at a time then switch (aha!) it off and not have to worry about it, and while few people would find the levels themselves a challenge, it tests me on the right level. I could probably get to the end of the game and only really make an effort on the boss battles, but of course the real challenge of the game comes from getting all the collectibles. This isn’t particularly difficult either but I will have some backtracking to do on those levels where I didn’t quite get enough Lums, or rescue all the Teensies!

Watch out, he'll batter you...

When I’ve had some time with my laptop I’ve come back to my old sparring partner, Mordheim: City of the Damned, where I’ve been trying to get my Nordland Ravagers warband up to the point where they could tackle the third campaign mission. This mainly involves my Ogre getting to level four before someone kills him, as I desperately need a soldier in the warband immune to the fear effects put upon by the Daemons I know are coming. But I’ve also taken some time out for him to train some skills, so it’s a slow process, during which one of my better henchmen lost one of his arms, and one of my better archers died altogether (to be replaced by someone that, I found out after the fact, only had one leg.) Still, I’ve always really enjoyed this game so I’m not complaining!

Will they ever beat him?

Finally on Sunday I carried on with Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords. It took us a while to organise this one, and some people have come and gone. This time we organised it with two of our characters missing, so Dave turned up with his friend Ross who created a polearm fighter. He also took the Big Game Hunter feat that is one of the campaign traits for the adventure path. This is an interesting one because I’d read the first adventure for this, Burnt Offerings, long before I’d read the rest of the campaign and while Big Game Hunter telegraphs the larger creatures that this feat is designed to deal with, I wouldn’t necessarily think to take it knowing what was coming in Burnt Offerings! It came in useful this time, as we are at the fourth section – Against the Giants – and the party made short work of four Stone Giants, two Lamias (who are designed in the adventure to be a lot harder than the ones that appear in the Bestiary,) and two Young Red Dragons.

It’s a testament to how enjoyable the Pathfinder adventure paths are that we’ve kept this going for two and a half years, but I’ve run into a problem with Against the Giants – Action Economy. Basically what this means is that while the monsters I’m running are pretty hard in their own right, I haven’t got enough actions with my monsters per turn to pose a threat to the party. To be fair, this might be due to the fact that I didn’t do a lot of preparation (or I might have had the Dragons come to assist the Lamias, that would have been interesting!) but it’s something I might need to think about for future sessions and campaigns.

Last Week's Games: Rayman Legends, Crash Bandicoot, Papers Please, Legend of Grimrock

They're all adorable, but there's something a little... off.

I’ve had a go with a few different games in the last week or so. One game I’ve played quite a bit but forgot to mention in last week’s blog was Rayman: Legends, a terrific platformer on the Switch. I’ve got a couple of versions of the original game but games have improved in their development since then and I’m enjoying 2D platformers with more modern conveniences! There’s not much to it in principle; you traverse fantastic environments as Rayman or one of his variations, hitting bad guys, collecting Lums and rescuing Teensies (the latter two being cutesie creatures that make squeaky noises.) There’s a lot of levels so you can keep going for a while. I’ve not played all the Rayman games, but this game appears to dispense with the “Go to this part of the map and play this level” modular system started by the earlier Mario games. Instead, the levels are selected by jumping in to paintings, more of which are unlocked as you progress. There’s also not (as far as I can see) any real progression in terms of your abilities; everything you can do, you can do from the start of the game. The progression in the game aside from beating the levels is collecting all the unlockables, which is usually achieved by, again, collecting Lums and rescuing Teensies. This might seem like a grind, but Rayman is one of those games where you can easily put it down and come back to it later without having missed much. I’m having a great time with it at the moment, and I’m sure I’ll continue to do so!

Make the mask noise. I dare you.

I also carried on with Crash Bandicoot on the PS4; I’ve found myself enjoying this game more as it’s gone on! I got to the end of the game and beat it, but I don’t want to say too much about it at this point because I want to save my main remarks about the game for the review; anything I have to add to it will probably go on next week’s blog, or the week after.

Is he legit?

On my laptop I played Papers Please, because there’s nothing at all funny about coming home from work and playing a video game about going to work. If you don’t know, it’s a game where you are the inspector for the border of a fictional country which, given the volatile political situation it represents, is probably eastern European. You have to check people’s passports for inconsistencies, allow them through if you don’t find any, and deny them entry if you do. At the same time you need to be making enough money every day to feed and heat your family. It’s a bleak game, and I’ve only unlocked three out of the twenty possible endings so far and none of them have been good, but there’s something about the core gameplay loop that is fascinating and keeps me coming back to the game years after I originally bought it.

No. No no no no no no no. No.

I also had a go with Legend of Grimrock, a relatively modern update of the old-style dungeon crawler games where you had a party of four people and you had to go through the dungeon and, in this case, escape. It’s a good game; it’s a nice mix of puzzles, combat, resource and inventory management, and spellcasting from pressing the correct combination of symbols. The interface is a bit wonky but this fits in with the style of the game and forces you to concentrate on what you’re doing. I began a new play-through and got to the third level of the dungeon, where I had to call time because the spiders were making me very jumpy. The giant spiders in Legend of Grimrock are absolutely horrible, due I guess to the fact that the movement in the game looks very mechanical and inhuman, and also because I’m playing on a laptop I don’t have the option to sit further away from the screen. Usually I know they’re coming but when one suddenly appears and you’re not expecting it, I panic and completely mess it up! I’ll get through it – I’ve done it before – but this isn’t a pleasant level to play!