Rayman: Raving Rabbids

I started playing Raving Rabbids two days ago. Yesterday, I finished it. I didn't spend more than about four hours to get from the very beginning to the disappointing ending that seems to puzzle fans all over the internet. While it's an interesting game, there just isn't enough substance there to justify buying it. Note that I played the PS2 version - the Wii is the system everyone seems to think Rabbids is for. It's similar to such party games as Mario Party and Wario Ware in that you're constantly doing small tasks with simple and unique control schemes. This is great for the Wii, where you can make full use of the Wiimote's gestures and ability to draw on the screen, or aim like a gun during one of the game's frequent on-rails shooter sections. There's a problem with this, though - after you beat the game, you're challenged to play through the mini-games again on Score mode, working until you get perfect scores on all of them. When you finish doing that, maybe you unlock a better ending (the original ending of the game is pretty disappointing), but I'm never going to know unless someone tells me, because getting a perfect score on any of these games is next to impossible. For a game that shows no challenge at all to pass in Story mode, Score mode seems tacked on simply to add more playtime. It's very frustrating - in fact, the Wii version was found to be impossible to complete because of bugs in the controls! It's not worth paying full price for; However, for a party game, or just for a quick playthrough, Rabbids could make a fun rental.

The graphics are well-designed. The Rabbids themselves are interesting characters, with personalities developed through the minigames. The humor is occasionally dark and sometimes tongue-in-cheek. It never gets in the way, and if you liked the Bunnies Don't _____ commercials even a little, it's only going to add to your enjoyment. Music isn't great, but it does the job. There are songs like Misirlou and snatches of Jungle Boogie by Kool and the Gang - the music as a whole seems to be channeling Pulp Fiction's soundtrack through a falsetto cartoon filter, and one of the challenges you are routinely assigned as part of each set is a dance-floor rhythm game. It's surprising how entertaining a simple minigame like this can be, but it's one of the few you'll want to go back to again and again.

The most serious problems, obviously, are the extremely short length of the game, and the difficulty of Score mode. There are plenty of unlockable movies, but they're all very short - most of them are the Bunnies commercials from tv. This isn't enough of a reward for hours of play, if you're trying to get the highest possible score on some of these minigames. It's difficult to tell what they expect of you with some of the minigames scoring schemes - for example, while replaying one of the dance games over again in Score mode, I got a record of something like 250 perfect timing and 1 "normal" timing with no misses. My Score mode score, out of 1000, was just over 600. There are also minigames where you are told to do things like alternately press the control sticks forward and backward - in these games I've found that if I do it too quickly, my character seems to lose steam - I have to look for some kind of sweet spot where I'm moving just fast enough to get Rayman to reach the maximum speed and stay there. The instructions don't mention anything about this, and things like this combined with the low quality of the unlockables makes you not want to keep playing for very long.

So while Rayman: Raving Rabbids definitely isn't worth buying for anyone except the most hardcore Rayman series fans, definitely try taking it for a rental to sample the unique atmosphere / humour and the world of Michel Ancel. This goes double if you like party-style games!