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Rayman Raving Rabbids Review - Wii

Introduction

If a series is floundering, why not rest it for a while and spend some time getting to know the Wii hardware with, say, a minigame collection? The folks of Ubisoft did exactly that, resulting in Rayman Raving Rabbids, a game that places Rayman in the background and focuses squarely on small furry mammals. With arms and legs. Yeah, I know. Crazy.

Gameplay

Your first port of call when starting up a file is the Story mode. It’s a slightly misleading name, because the entire plot of the game is 'Rayman gets kidnapped when having a picnic, and then performs minigames in a colosseum for crazy rabbits, using the plungers he gets as prizes to climb up the wall of his cell and escape out the open window’. You start each day in your room in the dungeons, and then get dragged out to the colosseum and presented with four tasks. Once you’ve done three, the big master door will open, which contains the major minigame ('boss', if you like). Of course, completionists will want to finish all four before moving on. With fifteen days in total, that’s 75 different challenges to complete.

The minigames are all pretty clever, and consistently hilarious. It’s worth noting, though, that some games are just harder iterations of previous challenges. There are also two recurring challenges that you’ll encounter once each per day – a shooting game, and a dancing game. The shooter is in the vein of Time Crisis and other on-rails light-gun games, with millions of crazy bunnies popping out of doors and jumping around. It is intuitively controlled, with the Wiimote used for aiming, the B trigger for shooting, and a flick of the nunchuk to reload. You’ll have so much fun with them that you won’t mind playing them so often. The ‘Bunnies Think They’re In A Movie’ game is a highlight – it’s set on a train and provides a surprising and hilarious twist halfway through the level when you realise what’s going on.

The other recurring minigame puts Rayman in a dance-off against the rabbits, to the tune of such classics as ‘Pump It’, by the Black Eyed Peas. Spinning rabbits converge on Rayman from both sides of the stage, and when they arrive on the marked spots in time with the song, you wave either the nunchuk or Wiimote to get rid of them. It’s great fun, and works really well. Again, you’ll have so much fun watching the ‘rabbids’ dancing along with Rayman that the repetitive nature of playing basically the same game every round can be overlooked.

Not all the minigames are as successful, however. There are many games which require you to pump the nunchuk and remote up and down one after the other, which gets incredibly tiring when you don’t succeed on your first try. Some times, the games seem to respond better to a flick action from the wrist, while others seem to require an in and out ... (continued next page)