Decent game that's just lacking fun and liveliness
The story in Great Escape is simple: Admiral Razorbeard is ruining the land and capturing its inhabitants, and of course Rayman… is captured? Well, only temporarily, of course, as he escapes right at the beginning. Then he sets out to defeat the pirate robots and save the world. The 'voice acting' is a kind of gibberish that can be kind of funny sometimes, but it doesn't really contribute much to the game, but it does give the characters what little personality they have.
Rayman 2 plays like most 3-D platformers, only with controls that don't work as well. The movement can sometimes be too sensitive or not sensitive enough. On the final boss battle, the controls are so bad that it becomes nigh impossible to beat the game. The rest of the controls work though, like holding Z to strafe around enemies. Of course, Rayman uses his limbless abilities to… wait, no he doesn't! He shoots stupid balls of energy at enemies from his hands rather than throwing punches! What's up with that? Come on!
The visuals are pretty nice for the N64. They're good, but there isn't a whole lot to talk about here. A little fuzzy, but that's how most 3-D games were on the system. The sound is pretty good too.
The one thing that bugs me about Rayman 2 is its personality, or lack thereof. Sure it's evident that the characters aren't totally flat, but the game as a whole just feels a little… lifeless. I don't know what it is that makes me feel like that, but I just don't have much fun at all when I play the game, and after playing Rayman 3 (a game that probably has the most personality of anything I've ever played), it's hard to like this one.
So Rayman 2 disappointed me a little. Sure it's a decent game, but it just lacks life and personality, has a couple big control issues here and there, and just isn't all that fun. As a huge fan of Rayman 3, I didn't really enjoy this game as much as I hoped. If you're interested in it, you can get it really cheap on places like Amazon.com or eBay, and it'll probably be worth your time and money. But to me, Rayman 2 was just a little bit of a disappointment.
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