Genre: 2d platformer
Developer: Ubisoft
Publisher: Ubisoft

Rayman Legends contains probably the most pretentious artwork in the entire annals of video gaming. Ubisoft's glorified Flash game engine, the "UbiArt Framework", "allows artists and animators to easily create content and use it in an interactive environment", according to its Wikipedia article. And when you set a bunch of artistic, queer frechmen loose with a "coding-hardly-required" game engine, you wind up with an air-guitar playing bastardization of the original whimsical and abstract Rayman universe. Which is a shame, because some of the more innocent background art-- particularly the dungeon theme set-- is quite lush and rich.

Like ukelele music set to whistling? Like licensed "rock" music overlaid with raspy, "this is what metal sounds like in the imaginations of people who have never heard metal"-style vocals? Then you, dear reader, will love the audio direction in Rayman Legends. To everyone else though, the game's aural qualities will be somewhere in the spectrum of "eye-roll inducing" on one end, and "reaching for the console's power button to turn it off" on the other end.

So far it has been established that Rayman Legends' art direction is looking down its nose at the player at every turn. But stripping that away, how are its mechanics? Well, they are wonderful in fact; the level design is constantly switching between forced-scrolling-- both horizontal and vertical-- and not, heavy platforming segments, and very clever touch-screen scenarios, where the AI controls the main character, while the player clears a path for the AI using touch screen and stylus.

No where is it more evident than in Rayman Legends that video games are made by large teams of people with varying personalities and priorities. The art direction is almost dizzyingly obnoxious, full of pompous "aren't I cute" condescension, while the meat and potatoes of the game-- the core mechanics and level design-- are almost completely the opposite: impressively solid and down to business. One's overall impression of this game then depends almost purely on how sensitive one is to its horribly tacky aesthetic.