Rayman 2 PC (Rayman Origins Steam preorder bonus) review

Posted this on the Steam forums a bit ago. Figured I'd post it here as well.

I'm disappointed, overall. This seems like a fairly bad port of the N64 version, for the reasons discussed below:

• The textures, etc. aren't matched very well. Text is high-resolution but the title logo contains obvious texture seams. Rayman's eyes are noticeably poorer quality than the rest of him. And I swear to god, the tutorial fairy dude did not puke rainbows on the N64.

• The controls are wonky. Arrow keys to move, A to jump, Space to attack, Z to dive, Ctrl to strafe, and the camera controls are Q, W, and End, no way to enter first-person mode that I could see, and no configuration option. Hell, playing around with the in-game configuration options is a good way to get a CTD. I don't even know if you can play this with a gamepad, and let me tell you, you'll need it, if only for the enhanced mobility a joystick gives you.

• The draw distance is shot to hell. I played this game on the N64, and let me tell you, on that system I could definitely see Lums fade in with distance instead of the instant appearing crap they've got in this port, and I could see the lums in the last section of Fairy Glade (the part with the updrafts) BEFORE I was next to the updraft they were in. In this port, I have to be almost on top of a lum before it shows up, and given how many high-speed and zoomed-out sections this game has, that's a good way to add fake difficulty to an already pretty tough game.

• The music's different than the N64 version. I'll be the first to admit this is more a matter of personal taste than anything else, but there's a few instruments that this version is missing from the Fairy Glade BGM, and to me it hurts the piece.

• Some of the information given by the game itself is just plain wrong. For example, the tutorial tells you to press J if you want to read the flavor information that collecting Lums gives you, when it's actually F1.

I can't imagine it'd be too difficult to fix most of these issues, as they're probably all fixable by literally going into a config file and altering a couple lines of text, but they're still pretty big issues in my book.

Basically, if you still have a working N64, the Rayman 2 bonus is not worth preordering Origins over. That's not to say Origins isn't worth preordering, just don't do it if the main reason you're doing it is getting a copy of Rayman 2.