Rayman Legends

"Rayman Origins" is a bona fide 5 star game. It had wit, charm and a beautiful colorful palette. And it problably had the best in-game music since the days of the SID-chip. Me and my girlfriend played the s--t out of that game and loved every second of it.

Now the time has come for Ubisoft's try to repeat the success. Are they lucky this time around? Yes and no.

+ The hub was a huge improvement over "Origins". Also good use of extra features such as invasion and Kung Foot (but scratch the Lucky tickets and Creatures for next time, ok?)
+ Online leaderboards and challenges are good ways to prolong the playability, though I doubt that there will be many who wants to play for so long that they collect the one million lums it takes to unlock the last playable character (which is kinda uninteresting anyway, since it's probably just a color variation of the standard rayman/globox/blue guy-template)
+ The new addition of music levels are nothing short of genius. What a great way to expand the gameplay to a running gag.
+ 10 princesses. They are cool heroines and not as sexualized as the fairies(?) you rescued in "Origins". I was a huge globox fan in the first game but for "Legends" I actually played one of the princesses almost all the way through. That is good character design.
+ The level design is as clever as always. Now it even corporates a new feature with the B button (on Xbox controllers) that commands the toad(?) Murfy, making the game somewhat more challenging. However, clever as the levels may be...

- ... they are not as cheerful, colorful and fun as those in "Origins". I was not the gleeful child-in-an-adult-body this time around as I was in "Origins". The palette is a lot darker which I don't fancy that much.
- For "Legends" the developers are going for a more serious, darker and epic tone. This is most noticeable in the music which isn't nearly as memorable as the one in "Origins". It's mostly orchestrated, epic music almost straight out of a high budget action movie.
- The bosses in "Legends" are straight up boring! Firespewing dragons and dark clouds and shit. They lack the childish fun that "Origins" bosses had, like the big payoff of meeting the hell mother boss after you've gone though the fire and brimstone that make up the extreme nightmare/hell levels in "Origins".
- The narrative of chasing the 6 blue, evil guys and kicking them to you-know-where was fun the first two times, but became repetitive, lacked diversity and the end result felt like a bit of anti-climax actually.
- "Legends" isn't nearly as hard as "Origins". We breezed through the game in 2 sittings. "What, was that it?" was our quick response as the credits rolled.
- You can play most of "Origins" levels in "Legends". Felt kinda cheap to re-use them again. Build more levels next time, ok?

So: playing the game is fun, but the sound and look of it doesn't quite match my expectations. Therefore, I became frankly quite disappointed. It's a quality product however, and it deserves a (weak) 4-star rating from me.