The Ubisoft hero embraces free to play: will it work?
With Rayman Jungle Run and the subsequent Rayman Fiesta Run, Ubisoft had shown brilliantly that it was possible to bring the typical feeling of the platform series even in mobile territory, simplifying the formula just enough to meet the modest performance of touch control systems and offering a good amount of content at an attractive price. In some surprising ways, the transalpine software house has decided to radically change the register with this new Rayman Adventures, modifying the game setting, adopting a new free to play model and granting an exclusive time to the Apple TV version: now that the game is also available on iOS and Android devices, let's see if this revolution has brought good results ...
Free to Ray
The core of Rayman Adventures' gameplay is basically the same as the previous ones: the protagonist runs alone along two-dimensional scenarios, and the user has to bring it to the end of the various levels by touching the screen to make it jump and crawling forward to make it carry out an attack, two basic actions accompanied by some variants that do not weigh down a control system that is confirmed as simple and effective.
What changes (and quite a lot) is all that revolves around these fundamentals: instead of presenting a simple succession of stages, the game is divided into micro-adventures made up of a handful of levels belonging to three different categories by setting and modality of allocation of points. There are therefore sections based on combat that require you to eliminate as many enemies as possible, others in which you must try to collect all Lum and finally the most exploratory ones that reward those able to find every hidden treasure. In the obvious attempt to make the title truly accessible to anyone, Ubisoft has preferred to offer short and decidedly affordable internships, perhaps a little too good of doing good, especially for those who have had experience with previous Raymans, it is difficult to hide a certain disappointment for all too simple levels that in the long run do not always prove to have great variety and bite. A partial consolation comes from a technical department that confirms the absolute excellence already appreciated in the prequels, showing a colorful graphic full of characters that seem to come straight out of a cartoon and a sound endowed with the usual load of personality.
In this new free to play format, Rayman Adventures does its duty without impressing
Catch them all!
The free-to-play bogeyman is handled by Rayman Adventures quite painlessly, as it involves a tendentially secondary component of the gaming experience. During his journey, in fact, the player gets eggs containing creatures that can provide support in the gameplay (helping him to find the secrets, to collect the Lums or provide him with a shield against enemy attacks) and these are the main object of the dynamics related to in-app purchases: from the food needed to feed them to the elixirs useful to improve their characteristics or to speed up the processes, everything passes through the disbursement of blue crystals obtainable in a small part by playing and otherwise present in various packages in the appropriate online store.
With a little patience you can therefore face the adventure without having to pay a penny, on the condition of neglecting this aspect a little and being satisfied with Rayman's main costume, since all the variants of the case are also paid . More than this sales model, what makes Rayman Adventures 'nose turn upside down is the developers' decision to prevent the user from retracing their steps and facing the completed levels once again: once an adventure has been completed , this becomes unattainable, to the good of all those who would like to recover some LOS lost on the street or aspire to a better score. Not very well - at least in the version we tested at the time of writing the article - even the stability of the application's network functions, which requires an active connection to be used: on several occasions server-related problems prevented us from continuing , and it also happened that the consequence of one of these errors was the partial loss of our progress. We close with a note concerning the Apple TV version of the title: if on the one hand running Rayman Adventures on a television makes even more justice to its fantastic graphic rendering, on the other hand the control system via the remote control is undoubtedly inferior for accuracy and responsiveness to that of a touch screen, even if it must be said that it is comunqu.
