Rayman Arena (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 5.1 (2.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Jeff Gerstmann
• Reviewed on: 10/10/2002
• Released on: 08/31/2002
• Originally published on GameSpot: Rayman Arena (PC) Review

The bread and butter of console gaming has always been the mascot-driven platform game. Nintendo has Mario, Sega has Sonic, and Ubi Soft has Rayman, the armless little guy who's appeared in a few different platform games for quite a few different platforms. The other all-too-common practice for these mascots is to spin them out of the action genre and put them into a rough-and-tumble driving game. Mario had Super Mario Kart, Sonic had Sonic R, and now Rayman has Rayman Arena, a foot-racing game originally designed for the original PlayStation and the current crop of consoles. The original game itself isn't terrible, but the port of the game to the PC is mediocre at best.

Right off the bat, Rayman Arena kicks you in the teeth with a collection of presentation problems. The first hurdle comes in the form of a CD check. Rayman Arena is a two-disc game, and for reasons understood only by some guy at Ubi Soft, the game forces you to insert both discs for the CD check, even when you select the maximum install. As is common with ports of console games, Rayman Arena's front-end interface is extremely clunky. You're presented with a bunch of meaningless icons and every time you click anything, you're treated to a special little "whizzing through space" animation that brings up the next menu full of meaningless icons. While you can turn these menu transitions off, the game doesn't seem to actually save your settings from session to session. Also, the interface jumps back and forth between letting you use the mouse to select things and forcing you to use the arrow keys to, say, quit back to the main menu.

Rayman Arena is broken up into two types of gameplay. The first is a standard arcade racing game. Each course consists of three obstacle-filled laps, and the object is, as always, to get around those three laps faster than your opponents, of which there can be up to three. It isn't just a straight run, though. You'll have to jump over and around barriers, climb up walls, surf down waterways, and do some fast platform jumping to come in first place. Attacking plays a much larger part in the game's battle mode, which puts you into a small arena and lets you fight it out. The game plays like a very rudimentary third-person shooter, complete with the ability to lock on to your opponents. Strangely enough, the PC and PlayStation 2 versions of the game are structured completely differently than the Xbox and GameCube counterparts. The PC version is much more focused on using ice shots to freeze your opponents, and you start off facing four opponents right off the bat in a single-player game. The single-player game combines both the race and battle modes, putting three of each level type into a collection of leagues. The coolest levels--found in the bonus league--have a Tron-like grid look to them, but unfortunately, they can be run solo only in the game's single-player mode.

The game's default controls aren't particularly good. You can configure the keyboard and mouse individually for race and battle games, and you can also use a gamepad, which is probably the most convenient way to play the game. Unfortunately, it's also the most difficult to configure, as we had trouble getting two or three different pads to work properly with the game.

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