Rayman® Origins

I'm a shooter guy by trade, so when I sat down with Rayman Origins I expected to clock out after an hour and go reinstall something with a kill feed. Twelve hours later I was still chasing Tricky Treasure chests and arguing with myself about whether the movement felt tighter than Super Meat Boy. Short answer: it's close, and that's not something I say about many platformers. What Ubisoft Montpellier built here is a 60-plus-level side-scrolling platformer that runs on the UbiArt Framework engine, targeting 1080p at 60 frames per second, and the result is hand-drawn visuals so fluid they read almost like animation cel footage. The art holds up completely. More important to me than aesthetics, though, is how the controls translate to hardware. Run it on a wired Xbox controller and the input response is exactly what you want: wall-runs, hair-copter glides, and the wall-kick chains all register cleanly. There is a slight floatiness to Rayman's glide that a few players have flagged, and under stress the hover mechanic can stutter if you repeat it in quick succession, but the level design is forgiving enough that frame-perfect precision is only truly demanded in the optional Tricky Treasure chase sequences and the endgame Land of the Livid Dead content. Everything else is checkpointed and restartable with zero penalty, which keeps the pace moving even when you die. The variety is real. Standard platforming stages, mosquito shooter side-scrolling segments that genuinely play like a shoot-em-up (use a pad, not keyboard, for these), bridge-crossing speed runs loaded with King Lums to collect, and boss fights ranging from multi-eyed pink monstrosities to a mountainous golem. Lum collection gates the treasure chest chase levels, and collecting all ten ruby teeth unlocks the Land of the Livid Dead, which is genuinely hard and genuinely optional. The progression of unlocked abilities, including swimming, diving, size-shifting, and the hair-copter, rolls out over the first half of the game rather than upfront, which feels slightly conservative given how well they all work together. The co-op situation deserves a straight answer since it's a tagged feature: up to four local players can run the full campaign as Rayman, Globox, or either of the two Teensies, with drop-in and drop-out at any time. Players can boost each other to higher platforms and revive downed teammates. That revival mechanic changes the game meaningfully. It is couch-only. There is no online co-op, has never been, and configuring additional controllers on PC requires manually assigning player slots, which is mildly annoying but functional. If you have three people on the sofa and enough controllers, this is one of the better local co-op experiences available on PC. If you are playing solo it is still worth every minute. PC-specific notes worth flagging: the Mac version does not run on macOS 10.15 Catalina or above, so Mac buyers should verify compatibility before purchasing. The after-level results screen cannot be skipped on PC, and cutscenes are noticeably compressed compared to console versions, two minor rough edges on an otherwise solid port. No achievements on PC either, if that matters to your backlog tracking.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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