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In shooters, you tend to play as people.
In sports games, you tend to play as people.
Fighting games, RPGs, and survival games?
Buff people, pointy-eared people, and dirty people.
But in platformers it’s possible for you to be anything.
This is not a genre where realism matters one bit.
The main thing is a fun skill set and a recognizable silhouette.
UnlikeMario 64, though, the hub for Rayman Legends doesn’t feel like a real space.
It feels like the lobby you might run around while waiting for a multiplayer game to start.
No, running through the rooms feels like opening and closing folders on your desktop.
You begin in the cosmos, enter a galaxy, then fly to planets within that galaxy.
It has the same Matryoshka Doll structure, with each layer hiding a smaller one within.
And you’re not wrong.
But Rayman Legends and Astro Bot share more granular similarities, too.
Both games are focused on rescuing characters who are stranded within the levels.
In both Astro Bot and Rayman, success is measured by how many of these blue dudes you save.
And in both games, some are more important than others.
Lots of games have difficult-to-reach collectibles, but few use characters as the thing you’re collecting.
Their move sets are similar, too.
Astro can run, jump, punch, and hover on laser beams.
Rayman can run, jump, punch, and hover using his floppy hair.
On an even more granular level, these boys both die the same.
When Astro gets hit, he swells up like a balloon, then explodes.
What am I to make of this?
I don’t know.
I don’t know the answer to that either.
Ultimately, Astro and Rayman are just two platformer heroes trying to make it in a tough world.
And that’s what platforming is all about.
Give me whimsy or give me death.
