Rayman Origins
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this game – in a good way, I suppose. It looks fantastic with a visual design that manages to be fresh while rehashing platform gaming tropes like “the ice world”, “the water world” and “the mountain world”. It controls well, with a few glaring exceptions that has more to do with an overambitious feature set than sloppy programming. The difficulty ramps up in a good way, the game starts off easy but ends up challenging without any noticable transitions. I was raised on platform games so I might be biased, but it is truly a great game.
… So I’ll defer to specific nitpicks. The game becomes a bit repetitive after a while, there are plenty of levels but not a lot of different challenges. Checkpoints are usually placed in good places but occasionally you’ll have to repeat a tedious and easy collecting task because there is a tricky bit in the end of a section. And speaking of checkpoints – the popup suggesting that you leave a level after you die a few times is more offending than anything else since for the most part of the game there is only one way to proceed. Finally, there was an intermittent bug in one of the more challenging levels that made it unsolvable, this ruined a few levels for me as it made me doubt whether bonuses that were really hard to reach merely were really hard to get or bugged out.
But yeah, nitpicks. Great game overall.