Rayman 3D

I'll admit that I bought Rayman 3D for one reason only – it was the only game I was even a little bit interested in for the 3DS launch, and I wanted something to test out the hardware. Additionally, I'd never played any of the Rayman games before and I certainly enjoyed the other two Michel Ancel games I've played before, Rabbids Go Home and Beyond Good and Evil. Up front – yes, this is definitely a competent proof-of-concept for the 3DS hardware, but beyond that, the most that Rayman 3D can aspire to is being just OK, more interesting as an emblematic work of the late-90s school of 3D platformers than as a game that one would want to play these days.

There are additional, product-centric problems at work here too. Ubisoft have clearly pounced upon the unsuspecting customer in an attempt to make a fast buck. This isn't some new Rayman game for the 3DS – this is the uber-ported Rayman 2, originally released on the Dreamcast/N64/PS1, and subsequently every platform ever released. Partially this is due to the game's classic status, but mostly it's Ubisoft making money off of an established property, milking it for as long as they can.

Now, I knew this going in. I knew that Rayman 3D was designed purely to rip people off, but the thing is, somehow I'd never played it before. For people like me, I at least expected a fun, classic 3D platformer, and in that way, Rayman 3D delivers – kind of.

Playing this game with absolutely no rose-tinted, nostalgic memories of it meant that I basically was assessing it on the merits I would apply to a 3D platforming game these days, a genre which I'd contend has only really hit its stride in the last five years, despite the fact that besides Nintendo, very few companies are making these games. Partially, this is due to the sheer "newness" of a 3D platforming experience in the mid-to-late 90s. Simply being able to move about in three dimensions (quite a bit more literally in the case of the 3DS) was seen as a mind-boggling experience, and only recently have the level architectures and design seen any of the same verve as in their 2D counterparts.

Rayman 3D came at the tail end of the 3D platformer explosion that was, of course, kicked off by Super Mario 64, and doesn't have as many of the growing pains as some of its earlier counterparts. Its age, however, still shines through. While Rayman himself is suitably athletic and controls shockingly well, the levels simply aren't very interesting – they're all jutting angles, garish brown-green, and humongous, putting an emphasis on the width and breadth of the level layout rather than finding that perfect balance between 3D freedom and 2D propulsiveness as in something like Super Mario Galaxy 2. Often times, this leaves the player navigating wide open expanses with little to do in them, which is something that seems fundamentally 90s and has been mostly ironed out of gaming these days.

So the platforming is totally solid, if bland. This description doesn't really extend to the narrative. While Mario games are not exactly known for their narratives (outside of the RPG series), I've always found that they resonate with me on a certain level. Rayman 2's narrative is far too whimsical for its own good, a charge I never thought I'd level. It's full of some silliness with mechanical pirates, "lums" (fairies that need to be collected to open up new levels, annoyingly), and a goofy, super-deformed sidekick named Globox. Nothing really ever means anything, and the narrative threads that have you moving from one level to another seem totally arbitrary and not all that interesting – a real disappointment considering how good Ancel's whimsy is in Rabbids Go Home.

As I said, though – this is actually a really good way to show off the 3DS. Outside of the "it's an early 3D game finally played in 3D" aspect of it, the game does an admirable job of showing off the 3DS's most important features: stereoscopic 3D and the circle pad. The circle pad really is one of the nicest analog sticks I've ever used and it makes controlling Rayman totally intuitive, but I'm not going to go on about an institutional part of video games since – well, since the 3D platformer was introduced.

Now, the 3D isn't really anything spectacular – this is the post-conversion type of game, after all, rather than being specifically designed with 3D in mind, but it highlights that the 3DS easily sidesteps one of my major issues with 3D films.

Basically, when you watch a film with 3D glasses in a theatre, the 3D effect has two major downsides: first, it's noticeably darker than a 2D film, which simply doesn't happen on the 3DS – it's just as bright, and allows the graphics to really shine. And second, the effect is destroyed any time a 3D object hits the edge of the frame, cutting off the image in a garish and illogical way. The 3DS somehow creates the illusion of depth rather than "stuff popping out at you." This makes the 3D platforming in Rayman 3D completely joyous when you're actually doing something interesting, which happens a little too infrequently. Judging depth is a snap, and while I wouldn't go far as to say that all 3D representations on a 2D field have failed, as quite a few games have done interesting things with this limitation, it's clear that unlike in films, the 3D actually makes a certain amount of sense.

What ultimately undoes Rayman 3D is its clear laziness. I'm all for playing old games – I make regular stops at the city's retro gaming store – but when you're introducing a game into a modern context, at least have the good sense to fix some of the most easily fixable quibbles. When the music changes on a dime for no reason, or the sound is clipping even when it's only turned up halfway, that's not an idiosyncracy – that's something that's broken. And while certain aspects of the 3DS make it appealing to play Rayman 3D, Ubisoft clearly were not using a full stack of cards here – the bottom screen is used for precisely nothing (a worry I have about the 3DS moving forward) and the autosave feature is mostly broken. Considering that some levels might take upwards of forty-five minutes to complete, the idea that you can only save after beating a level makes Rayman 3D a strictly at-home affair. This makes sense as a console experience, but on a handheld, especially one with as many forward-thinking features as the 3DS, it's kind of unforgivable.

I had enough fun with Rayman 3D when it was simply being the game it was in the 90s, and I was able to take it on its own merits. But the resounding and resolute apathy with which Ubisoft put this port together is telling of their only desire – to rip people off. If you know what you're getting into ahead of time, you can certainly do worse than Rayman 3D, but that's a big "if."