Another week and another Wii U title! It's almost like it's getting a regular release schedule. Of course, Rayman Legends was due out over 6 months ago on the Wii U. But apparently Ubisoft got nervous because ZombiU sold incredibly poorly so they decided to delay the release and port it to every other system. Which made no goddamn sense and will mostl likely hurt it in the long run. September is jam packed with new releases and much like it's predecessor Origins, Legends is likely to get buried in the avalanche as opposed to it's original release date of February, when there was pretty much nothing else out.
That aside how is it? Pretty much like a fine-tuned version of Origins, which was already excellent. The visuals are gorgeous and the music is some of the best I've heard all year and the gameplay is mostly top notch. The gamepad-specific Murpy levels, where you move platforms and distract enemies to guide a character through a level have a nice initial novelty to them, but get old quick and don't add a lot to the gameplay. But it's a really minor complaint. It's just insanely chaming. I've stated before that at least in the 2D platforming space, Rayman has been handily outclassing Mario lately, and that trend continues here. New Super Mario Bros U (and subsequently Super Luigi U) were perfectly solid games, but this is the kind of sublime 2D platforming that harkens back to the glorious days of Super Mario World. Yes it really is that good. Unfortunately my plate is too full at the moment to really delve into it so I just rented it, but I'll be sure to pick it up when I whittle down my backlog a little, probably come Christmas time.
For the first time in what seems like ages a Blizzard game is on consoles. Granted, it's the controversial and divisive Diablo III, but it's a big start. But the console version strips away a lot of those issues by completely dropping the auction house and coming with a lot of the initial bugs fixed. The good news is if you are into hack-n-slash loot fests, this is right up your alley, and I can certainly see getting into this if I had no other big rpgs on my plate. Blizzard really knows how to make me want the shiny loot and there's just a good level of polish in the presentation and gameplay that very few games achieve. That being said, the gameplay does feel just a bit too old school. There isn't a whole ton of difference between this and Torchlight or even Diablo II with an HD coat of paint. But that's also the genre, you know what you are getting with this title so if you are interested a really polished but certainly not revolutionary or anything hack-n-slash lootfest this is a pretty solid bet. Especially on consoles where such picking are incredibly slim.
Finally, I played the demo of Brothers, which has been getting a lot of great reviews and came out this week on the PS3. The control concept is somewhat novel, as you control each brother with one of the analog sticks and solve puzzles in order to save your father. Maybe this speaks more to why demos are a bad thing, but I wasn't horribly impressed with what I played. The puzzles weren't clever, they were insulting simple and while the analog controls themselves working fine, having to press and hold the trigger buttons didn't work so well. Also the game seemed to be plagued with some bugs as I just got stuck at a couple of certain points. Again maybe it's just a poor demo, but I'm at least holding off til there's a good sale because this is a game that just doesn't seem worth my $15.
That's it for today but look for a new Gamer Cinema post this weekend and possibly a little something else if I have time.
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