1. If you like beautiful 2D platformers where you play as a limbless something or other who speaks in pig Latin, well, they made game for you. I guess there are other 2D Rayman games but they are on like Game Boy and Play Station and stuff so I'm the only one here who cares about that.
2. The music in this game is insane. Whoever played the kazoo on this should win a Grammy.
3. I was not crazy about the controls. They were tight and responsive but I thought the design felt a little strange. For one, you can do a little extra high flip jump if you jump while switching directions (like in say Mario 64 or NSMB) but I never once did it intentionally to complete a level and found myself dying in many sections when I did it accidentally. Also, Rayman can spin his ears and hover upon the second press of the jump button. To me, it would have felt more natural if this occurred upon holding the jump button. It all worked out in the end but I do feel this could have been fine tuned a bit better.
4. There is some sort of story to this. I think it is the same story as Sonic the Hedgehog or Mario games. You need to go to the right for some reason.
6. Why no exit to desktop option while in game, Ubisoft!?
7. The levels are overall good and well designed but there are few controller chucking moments where things just feel all together cheap.
8. The shmup style levels are the best thing ever. Normally when you have levels that are outside the standard gameplay mechanic, they feel tacked on and half-finished. These feel like the best shmup I've played in a year.
9. I want an all shmup, all the time Rayman. Make it happen!
10. I felt like the ordinary worlds could use more bosses. You get bosses on the last four worlds and a final boss and so forth but only after going through a whole long boss-free stretch and that's kind of lame. The world one boss is frequently one of the most memorable things about a game and Ubisoft neglected to have one here. Boo to that, I say!
11. You can unlock like a hundred different characters to play w/. Or, in my case, you can unlock the characters and not play w/ them.
12. This does that annoying thing platformers started doing in the nineties and never stopped doing where you can beat the whole game but still haven't beat it because you didn't collect every last thing you were supposed to collect. I kind of dig this gives you a sort of chose-your-own-difficulty option but also don't dig it because 100%ing this kind of thing gets really boring. Sorry you had to hear it from me.
13. Not gonna lie--there were moments of this that were frustrating enough I wanted to put it down entirely and just say screw it. In the end though, the parts of this that are fun are so fun that it makes it worth playing through the parts that are not fun. A little more polish w/r/t difficulty spikes and this is 10/10.