"Rayman"—a name that rings a bell. As one of Ubisoft's most prestigious game series, it's impossible to be unfamiliar with it if you have even a basic understanding of single-player games.
But awkwardly enough, due to the lack of new releases meeting modern standards over the years, coupled with generational shifts in the player base, the Rayman series has seen dwindling fresh blood. This is undoubtedly a headache for loyal fans who care about the series' development and hope it will achieve great success again.
Fortunately, this situation is finally coming to an end. Earlier this year, Ubisoft released some preliminary content for Rayman Legends Remastered, reassuring series fans and providing a clear path for new-generation players wanting to try the Rayman series.
And if you feel these preliminary contents aren't enough, then—thanks to Ubisoft's invitation, not long ago, I went to Ubisoft Shanghai to play Rayman Legends Remastered for about three hours.
As a complete remake of the 2013 game Rayman Legends, Rayman Legends Remastered retains the classic levels that were endlessly replayable back then and redesigns and upgrades the original's highly praised "music levels." Additionally, Rayman Legends Remastered introduces non-side-scrolling "Dragon Levels," offering more fun beyond the original experience.
Outside the levels, the addition of a world map integrates the scattered levels from the original Rayman Legends, creating a more cohesive worldview for the game.
Visually, Rayman Legends Remastered transforms from the original Rayman Legends' 2D backgrounds with "2D-to-3D" visual effects into 3D backgrounds built with rich virtual assets. Meanwhile, Rayman Legends Remastered inherits the Rayman series' tradition of investing significant resources to create exquisite animations for various sprites in the background.
This dual focus on quantity and quality in graphical upgrades gives Rayman Legends Remastered remarkably impressive visual effects. For old players familiar with the Rayman series, the product nature of Rayman Legends Remastered as "luxury new bottle holding aged wine" should be satisfying.
So for new players, besides the meticulous visual presentation, what other reasons make Rayman Legends Remastered worth playing?
I think the nature of being a high-spec remake of the classic Rayman Legends is itself the biggest reason.
Rayman Legends Remastered retains all unique and entertaining character performance designs from the original. As a rising star in the platformer genre, the Rayman series balances Mario's demand for precise landing points with Sonic's requirement for quick player reactions. The original Rayman Legends, being a later work in the series, refined this unique flavor to perfection. Now, this distinctive Rayman series flavor will be passed on to a new generation of players with the release of Rayman Legends Remastered.
In Rayman Legends Remastered, besides the basic movement state, you can enter a faster acceleration state by holding the right trigger button. Since the acceleration state is "instantly accessible and dismissible," the instantaneous reactions required during gameplay are significantly higher than in typical platformers.
When on the previous platform, you might need to accelerate to jump higher and farther, but upon reaching the next platform, you immediately need to decelerate to avoid crashing into instant-death traps due to excessive speed...
More importantly, the level design team of Rayman Legends clearly understands the game's character control characteristics. In the demo levels, I could clearly feel that they designed numerous platform transitions requiring flexible control of acceleration and deceleration. In some tricky parts, failure and retrying are common occurrences if your reaction speed and hand-eye coordination aren't strong enough.
Besides increasing difficulty and operational fun, such designs combined with hidden rewards within levels also provide rich replay value for what could otherwise become a boring platformer.
In the levels of Rayman Legends Remastered, almost every operational challenge has corresponding hidden rewards. Some provide large amounts of in-game currency called "Lums," while others are related to collecting "Teensies," which are needed for perfect level completion.
With these hidden rewards, mastering the methods to navigate each platform transition through multiple attempts and learning is just the starting point on your skill journey in Rayman Legends Remastered. Truly mastering a small section of a level means being able to perform these challenging maneuvers while still having enough operational space and attention to grab nearby hidden rewards.
It's worth mentioning that besides the aforementioned acceleration and deceleration features, along with common platformer mechanics like slow falling and wall jumps, Rayman Legends Remastered also introduces an additional control element in some levels: controlling the companion "Murphy."
Sometimes, you need to press buttons to instruct Murphy to eat obstacles blocking your path; other times, you need Murphy to promptly pave the way ahead. But regardless of specific details, the main theme remains unchanged—that is, while frantically controlling your movements, you also need to spare a finger to additionally attend to Murphy.
It might sound harsh, but the fact is, if your "hardware" skills aren't up to par, unfortunately dying or falling onto traps is almost inevitable during your first attempts. And obtaining hidden rewards in these levels will undoubtedly require more time and effort.
However, Rayman Legends Remastered isn't always so hardcore and cold-hearted. If you really struggle with certain levels, the development team thoughtfully provides a golden "Life Heart" at save points, which can block damage twice. With its help, some otherwise fatal situations can turn around, allowing players to use this brief invincibility to adjust their state and overcome difficult stages.
Taking another step back, if the golden "Life Heart" doesn't help you, the game will ask if you want to activate the built-in "Fairy Blessing," enabling "invincibility mode" and "flight mode"...
At this point, there shouldn't be any insurmountable challenges left, right?
Overall, Rayman Legends Remastered not only practices the development philosophy revered by countless people—easy to learn, hard to master—but also becomes one of the best footnotes to this phrase through its extremely low barrier to entry and incredibly high skill ceiling. If you're interested in this type of game, Rayman Legends Remastered will definitely not disappoint you.
Of course, this summary might sound a bit empty, so I plan to share a personal experience:
Before the demo started, during the "precautions" segment, the host specifically mentioned hoping everyone would manage their time well for each demo session to avoid running out of time due to spending too long on any single level.
At first, I found this hint quite baffling—a side-scrolling platformer is straightforward: you either pass or you don't. The time spent stuck on a level should just be considered a reasonable "budget," so how could it be called a "waste"?
But it wasn't until I repeatedly failed to reach a certain "Teensy," becoming increasingly anxious and itching to press the load option again, that I realized the true value of this advice and the inherent worth of Rayman Legends Remastered.
Thus, although Rayman Legends Remastered had just announced a delay before this demo report was published, my anticipation for it has only grown stronger.
If the demo is already like this, I can hardly imagine how addictive the full version of Rayman Legends Remastered will be.