360 review: Rayman Raving Rabbids (6/10)

Wow. I forgot to review this for the Wii. Maybe later.

Anyway, this is the Wii hit ported to the 360. It's a fun concept: in story mode, you play minigames to advance and unlock them in score mode, then you go back and play one to four players in score mode, unlocking other things.

The minigames are (mostly) fun, nice little tasks that are somewhat (or a lot) longer than, say, their Mario or Wario counterparts. On the Wii, they're given an added touch with the Wiimote (and occasionally the nunchuk). On the 360, well ... you can use the Live Vision camera, but I wouldn't recommend it except for the achievement.

Because the controls are different, there are a couple of minigames in the 360 version not in the Wii version and vice versa. Also, some of the 360 games (like the dancing ones) are easier to play, but some (like the bunny hunt) are harder.

Why would you not have an option to invert the cursor movement? Every shooter has this, and I mean every one. This makes no sense to me. Deduct one point for stupidity.

Also, the games take quite a while to load, which makes you wonder what's going on when you see their simplicity. Like the Wii version, the 360 version doesn't have a menu option to restart a challenge: you have to quit it, sit through the loading screen, pick it again, sit through the loading screen, click through the menus, and then sit through another (short) loading screen. Bor-ing.

Worst of all, if you "fail" a game by not getting a certain score, you get no credit for it in score mode. None. So then what's the point of giving us a score?

Also, despite the presence of Xbox Live, they insist on making us type in that stupid Web code to check leaderboards and stuff. Um, no. That's so last-generation.

The graphics are nicer, but really, what part of this is about the graphics? It's about getting rabbits to run into cacti over and over again.

Basically, it's like the Wii version, only without the novelty, and missing a couple of things that would have taken advantage of the 360's features. It's not a bad game if you have kids, but honestly, if you have kids, you should have a Wii anyway, so get it for that instead.

zlionsfan's rating: 6 floppy-eared bunnies out of 10.