Rayman Origins (Vita) ReviewJune 14, 2013 by

Rayman Origins brings the loveable Rayman over to the vita for the first time. Can Origins keep our love of collecting electoons and freeing fairies strong or have we finally outgrown our childhood friend.

This time around sees Rayman travelling to different lands in order to free the fairies and gain new powers. Once the fairies are freed they tell him that the kings of each land have been mutated and need to be saved so that they can utilise their power in order to face the evil mastermind. However, aside from a few short animations, the story is ultimately left in the background. A lot of the time you won’t care why you’re doing what you’re doing because it just doesn’t really matter. Fortunately, this lack of story doesn’t take away at all from the game as further explanation never feels necessary and a fully fleshed out story would inevitably feel out of place. Despite all of this, the characters all still manage to feel really funny and never take themselves seriously, and the enemies manage to maintain a portion of this atmosphere as well.

Now that's a hot tub

If the story is in the background then Raman Origins gameplay is well and truly in the foreground. First off, Rayman Origins is hard. You will probably spend three quarters of your time dying and retrying levels. Each time you die, you will get a little closer to understanding how you have to move through a level in order to survive it, even though some unfortunate checkpoint choices manage to make the whole process much more frustrating at times.

The core of Rayman Origins is that it is a 2D platformer that requires considerable skill in order for the player to navigate the slalom of enemies and traps that have been placed in your way, while collecting electoons for the medal or racing against the clock in a time trial. There is lots of jumping over and sliding under obstacles, bouncing on and punching enemies, and navigating traps to get coins for a greater reward. In other words, the typical platformer tropes. Using the vita also adds the ability to touch bubbles within the world, be they enemy or electoon, and pop them as if you were popping a real bubble. While this adds an extra level to gameplay and allows for you to get those collectibles in hard to reach places, some items don’t seem to register being touched and will fly right past without even noticing you.

Who knew scuba diving was so dangerous

Where Rayman Origins differs to the generic platformer is its dedication to the “perfect run”. In many levels, especially the later ones, you will need to time everything you do perfectly just to be able to make it to the end. When you add to this the collection of items, things can get pretty hectic. Fortunately, the vita manages to keep the frame rate up pretty consistently, with it only lagging in some of the more heavily populated areas.

Upon completing levels, you will be rewarded based on the number of electoons that you have collected and the number of cages that you have destroyed. Once a level is completed, it becomes playable as a time trial. The time trials offer a reward for completing the level within a certain time limit and a medal for completing it within a much harder time limit, generally requiring you to have a near perfect play through of the level. During time trials you cannot die, forcing you to really know a level before attempting to get the best possible time on it. These sorts of requirements, while ultimately frustrating, are what makes Rayman Origins so addictively enjoyable and keeps you coming back again and again for even more punishment.

Rayman loves his loot...

As well as electoons and gold coins, there are also relic fragments, which are tear shaped icons that hide in certain areas of the screen. Once you are near one of these fragments, a sound like a rattle shaking can be heard and you will have to search the screen for the fragment before using the front touch screen in order to grab it. This adds a nice little spot the item mini game to the otherwise hectic platforming, but sometimes the fragments are hidden behind areas that can’t possibly be seen, causing the player to have to furiously touch everywhere on the screen in order to find it. Finding each of these fragments awards you with part of a mural back in the “Snoring Tree”, or hub world.

... And just plain loves dancing

Some levels revolve around you chasing a treasure chest through a crumpling world in order to get the “tooth” out of it. These levels require a great deal of skill and timing as you have to not only navigate your way through the level, but also keep up with the ridiculously fast sentient treasure chests. Once have collected all ten of these teeth, they can be given to a character in the Snoring Tree for access to the most insanely difficult bonus mission conceivable. Fortunately, the only thing to be gained from completing this mission is a trophy, so most people will probably end up ignoring it.

Maybe I shouldn't play dentist - Rayman thinks to himself

Some levels also require Rayman to climb on top of his giant mosquito and navigate through more enemies and obstacles in order to reach his destination. On his mosquito, Rayman has the ability to make it shoot at his enemies and obstacles, causing them damage, and also to suck up enemies and spit them back out as projectiles in a Kirby-like manner. While these levels still require you to move quickly and pay close attention to your surroundings, they change up the gameplay by focusing more on defeating your enemies rather than using them to navigate obstacles. The collision detection during these levels seems quite poor however, and will cause many deaths while seeming as though nothing had gone wrong.

Why not open a refreshing can of... Angler juice?

As you progress through Origins you will come across boss battles. These fights generally focus on you needing to dodge the boss until an opening for you to attack is provided. These openings come in the form of strange pink blobs with eyes appearing on the bosses that you need to quickly destroy before the boss starts attacking again. These battles generally start out quite easy, allowing you to get your bearings as you read the bosses attacks, but quickly pick up the pace. Players will likely find that they will have to die multiple times before they can figure out how to dodge a specific attack or open up the boss’ weakness.

I hear some vegans have special powers

As far as the presentation in Origins is concerned, it is excellent. Each world that you will explore (fire or ice, jungle or desert) is bright with a vibrant colour pallete that makes the worlds and the characters feel all the more alive. All of the characters look brilliant in 2d and collecting medallions allows you to play as different characters. While the other characters offer no new gameplay elements, they are each well designed and come with their own animations and sounds.

The background music of each level works both to keep you motivated and to keep you calm. Each world has unique music and all of it sounds great. The sound changes seamlessly to the shaking of the rattle as you approach a relic and the audio queues let you know when you have cleared an area of danger. Rayman makes funny noises as when he gets hit by enemies and the electoons hum when a bonus multiplier is collected. While all of these sound great, some unfortunate sound effects feel very stale and overused. The sucking and shooting sounds in particular feel as though they could have been much better.

The early bird gets the Rayman

The Verdict

Rayman Origins is a wonderful, yet frustratingly difficult, platforming adventure. Regardless of whether you are a fan of Rayman and his past adventures, or just a fan of platformers, there is something there for everyone to enjoy. While there is no real story, it never feels needed and would like only make it more frustrating to retry levels over and over again. The gameplay, while not new, is far from shallow and the worlds are all vibrant and great to look at. Unfortunately, some of the sound effects manage to fall short of the high bar that the rest of the game has set.

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Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time ReviewMay 16, 2013 by

Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time is the first we've heard of Sly and the gang since 2005 with Honor Among Thieves, not counting the sly collection. With such a large gap between new games, can a new Sly game still be relevant and, better yet, can it even be good?

Sly 4 once again thrusts you into the shoes of Sly and the gang, only this time there are a few new characters tagging along. The story starts out not long after the events of the previous sly game and recaps most of it for those of us who haven’t played for such a long time, or haven’t played at all. The text from the Thievius Raccoonus, the book chronicling the deeds of all the past Coopers, is disappearing and it seems that a mysterious enemy is trying to erase Sly’s past. Because of this, Sly and the gang end up travelling across different cities in different times as they try to bring about an end to the dastardly villains plans, all the while delivering chuckle worthy one liners.

True meaning of Handicapable

The story of Thieves in Time, while good, is never great at any point. In fact, the length of the story really starts to wear on you as you approach the end of the game, making you feel the need to skip some of the cinematics just so that you can get back to actually doing something. This can be overlooked to a certain degree thanks to the generally well written dialogue and familiar feeling characters, but people new to the franchise will likely find the dialogue largely repetitive and unappealing.

Fortunately, the story of Thieves in Time isn't going to be the main draw in for most people. It will be the gameplay. You will spend most of your time, outside of the missions, as Sly exploring each city and looking for the many hidden collectibles and picking the pockets of enemies in order to buy character upgrades. The missions follow a similar format across time zones, sneaking and stealing with Sly, hacking with Bentley, and pounding things as Murray; as well as a mission or two to get to know the Cooper of that time’s unique “Cooper Focus” power. While none of these missions offer ground breaking new mechanics or ides, they are generally enjoyable. This is only marred at times by poorly placed checkpoints.

Some R&R between heists

The majority of your time, as you traverse the different levels and landscapes, will be spent avoiding battles and being stealthy in order to pick pocket enemies and deliver stealth kills. And you will want to do this as much as possible because once you get into a battle you are pretty much screwed. Every enemy is stronger than you are unless you are playing as Murray, in which case you are stronger than them but handle so badly that they have no problem getting in a hit or two fairly consistently. While combat is one of the most unbalanced areas of Thieves in Time, it will quickly get to the point where you restart, or are killed, and just start the area again making sure that you are stealthier this time around. While this does break the flow of the game at times, most enemies are quite easy to avoid so it never really becomes a problem.

There are also lots of mini games to be found. Thieves in Time is pretty much as close to a Super Mario Party with an actual story line as you can get. Yes, the main focus is on exploration and puzzle solving but, every two to three levels you will have another mini game forced upon you. These come in various flavors and difficulties and, while some of them can feel quite unbalanced, they are generally quite entertaining and even fun at times.

How every Hacker wished they looked

Sly and the gang look great. They all have fairly smooth 3D models and the animations are slick and polished for both them and their enemies. Each new area that you go to has a different art style and feel to it, with new additions for each of the Cooper ancestors as well as variations in how the enemies and the coins look. These sorts of little touches of polish go a long way to making the game feel like a solid experience. The cinematics are presented in a nice, comic book style that both feels and looks great.

The voice work in Thieves in Time, while at times irritating (that means you Bentley), is solid with the voices behind Sly, Bentley, and Murray (among others) reprising their roles. Coins will still clink when you grab them and the background music changes to an awesome sneaking sound effect when you are sneaking, as if you are playing through a nineties movie. The gun shots and grenade explosions all sound a bit dull and just plain off, but this is somewhat to be expected from a game that is targeted at a much younger audience.

Every Chef/Ninja needs one

As this is a cross-buy, cross-save game, I would feel remiss if I didn't compare how the game played on the PlayStation Vita compared to the PlayStation3. On the PS3, Thieves in Time looks undoubtedly better. Assets are crisper and models are smoother. However, this is by no means saying that the game looks bad on the vita. All of the characters still look great and you hardly notice the difference unless you are looking for it. Thieves in Time also plays differently across the platforms. The cross-save function works excellently and it is fun to play on the PS3, upload the save, and then pick up on the vita from the exact same spot. The front and rear touch on the Vita are incorporated nicely, taking over the functions of the L2, R2, L3, and R3 buttons; all of which are obviously not present on the Vita. At times it can feel clunky trying to reach for a certain area of the screen while in combat but it never gets hectic enough that this is really a problem. Both of them use their built in gyroscopic functions for some mini games, and this is, as usual, very annoying.

On the negative side, the loading times on the Vita are long. Very, very long; especially when compared to those of the PS3. It’s uncertain why this is, as the Vita is undoubtedly a powerful device, but it does get quite tedious. There were also a few minor bugs that occurred on the Vita that did not seem present in the PS3 version.

The Verdict

Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time is possibly the best addition to the Sly Cooper franchise to date. It has everything that you could want from a Sly game as well as some excellent use of art and variation in gameplay. The exploration is rewarding and the gameplay is just generally fun. It is unfortunately held back by some balancing issues in combat and some areas of the mini games, and a story that wasn't amazing but wasn't bad.

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