Reviews / previews
The long-awaited Rayman 2: The Great Escape is simply the best console-style 3D game ever to appear on the PC. It has charm, beauty and variety. It's easy to grasp and easy to like. And there's a lot of it.
This 3D romp finds the goggle-eyed hero of 1996's 2D Rayman fighting the Robo-Pirates from space who have broken "the heart of the world" (I don't write 'em; I just review 'em), imprisoned him and robbed him of his powers.
As the game opens, he's just gotten them back, and sets off across a range of verdant landscapes to save the world. He runs, he jumps, he glides (using his helicopter-like ears to slow his descent). He shoots down pirate cages, deals with a range of enemies (using thrown energy balls), chats up allies and collects colored "lums." (Some allow you to open the next world, other to pick up your game in advanced positions and some add to Rayman's life.) And that's just the basics.
For the most part, this is utterly delightful. The graphics are luminous, the effects big and brawny, the update smooth. The combat is challenging enough to make you work but cartoony enough that parents needn't worry. The music is sweet but not syrupy. The ways to move around are apparently infinite (a recent discovery: water-skiing!) and the side roads and secrets many. The puzzles are intelligent without being infuriating and the sizejust vast. (Rayman 2 consist of 17 worlds with 48-plus levels.)
And Rayman himself, naturally, is cute as a button--whether bubbling to some other cute character in his bubbly language or, bored by the player's inactivity, turning his torso into a basketball. At its best, Rayman 2 is pure, joyful, simple entertainment.
Regrettably, Rayman 2 isn't always at its best. It ran too fast on a Voodoo3 3000-based P-II/450--making some simple sequences difficult to complete. This problem cleared up somewhat (but not entirely) when I kicked the resolution up to high from the default low. (Curiously, it didn't crop up at all on a faster system--a P-III/550 for a 32MB TNT2 card.) With so many delicate running and jumping sequences in which a small mistake can have large consequences, this game needs a speed control.
And how hard would it have been to identify the source of input and adjust those should-be-handy in-game tips to reflect it? They all assume you're using the keyboard.
Not likely--I found keyboard control awkward. The movement controls aren't absolute but relative to the perspective, and, consequently, the same direction-key press that sends the little disconnected guy running jauntily down a dock in one scene may drop him fatally into the briny deep in the next. You can often rotate the camera in either direction or move it behind Rayman, but you can't make it stay there. You can't turn Rayman in place without going into a first-person view, turning him to the desired direction and then dropping back to the third-person view. And you can't reassign the keys.
I wound up playing with a gamepad, which has some of the same hitches, but feels more natural. I recommend it. That very naturalness is the key to Rayman 2: It's unforced fun--sweet, safe and satisfying. I wouldn't have it any other way.-- Peter Olafson / GamePro
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