Played and reviewed by Will
My family and I are currently on a trip to Virginia for Thanksgiving, meaning an eight hour car ride to and from. The day before we embarked on our journey, I realized that I haven’t even turned on my 3DS for quite some time. So, in the first step to fixing this problem, I went to Best Buy to buy a new game. I didn’t have a specific title picked out in my mind, but I did have a few options cycling through. I arrived at Best Buy, darted straight for the games section, and bought Rayman 3D.
Now let me explain this new “First Impressions” segment I’m going to begin. After buying a new game and whilst still playing it, I’ll type up a blog about how the game is going after I’m 20% complete. The final score will be out 10, because I won’t be going in depth as the full reviews that are written for this website. Ideally, these will be relatively short summaries of why I like, dislike, or I’m mixed on a game.
Click "READ MORE" to see why I gave this game a 6/10!
The speakers on the 3DS system itself are incredible! I’ve always felt from day 1 that the music and dialogue always come through crystal clear, and the slight surround sound effect adds great atmosphere to everything. While playing this game with sound coming through the speakers, I have no complaints. But whilst playing with headphones, there is a constant static sound that is audible, similar to white noise. I’m using skull candy ear buds, and they have crystal clear audio with my iPod, phone, and any other game I play. Something specifically in the audio coding causes this problem; a problem that I feel has no excuse in this age of gaming. After all, the 3DS is a portable system, so shouldn’t you be able to plug earphones into it while out in public and be able to get the same clear audio as without?
Controls are pretty simple for a platformer. Attack, jump, camera, etc. My only gripe is when you are in a section of the game where you’re only controlling your movement such as sliding down a river or jet-skiing behind a snake, there seems to be some input lag with the circle pad. This problem does sometimes affect my gameplay. I hate to use the excuse “it was the game”, but in this case…yeah, it was the game.
Story is what it is. Platformers typically don’t have the most well crafted stories. In Rayman 3D, it’s the cliché “find A to get to B and defeat C” storyline. I don’t mind this because I didn’t buy the game to be blown away into a stage of deep thinking. I just wanted some pick-up-and-play simplicity and fun.
Overall, this game certainly isn’t Game of the Year material in any sense, but it’s decent. Nice, simple, easy fun. So far, I’m satisfied with my purchase, but I don’t think I’ll be picking it back up once I’m done with it.
SCORE AS OF November 24th, 2011:
6/10