Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 (Wii) Review

Unlike the vaguely tedious colosseum ‘hub’ of the first game, now the solo-mode is split up over different areas of the world. You pick a region, you play some games, you move on. Another nice new addition is the use of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection...sort of. Whilst Ubisoft might have implemented online play they have instead gone for the far simpler and vaguely pointless online scoreboards. So you can see how well you’re doing in comparison to people all over the world, which is perfectly nice, but fairly unnecessary and also often very, very slow. All the sections in the one-player mode are themed by continent. So when you play in America you’ll have to complete minigames loosely (very loosely...) based on America, in Europe you’ll have to complete games based on some lovely European stereotypes and so on and so forth until you’ve travelled all over the world bashing bunnies in all sorts of strange ways.

What’s most disappointing about this game is how it manages to totally mess up what was a fairly enjoyable formula. Out of all the minigames on show only a few are entertaining and the rest of them just involve you shaking your arms around with very little subtlety. This, dear reader, is not fun. There is no guile, no intelligence, no variety, nothing worth your attention whatsoever. Put simply, this game is worse than the original. Admittedly there are some suitably wacky and inspired minigames that involve some inventive use of the Wii control system, but these are few and far between.

A lot of the minigames are simply too easy as well. One, Usual Suspects, gives you a video of a bunny committing a crime before asking you to pick said bunny out of a police line-up. When the video shows you loads of footage of said bunny wearing a large fruit hat committing said crime and then the line up only contains one bunny wearing said hat...well, as you can imagine it gets very boring. And what’s more, it takes forever. Even on harder difficulty, this game is often stupidly easy, stupidly mundane and just plain stupid. Also, the main incentive of playing the solo-mode is once again to unlock amusing costumes, which gives you very little incentive indeed to play on.

The game still has its moments though. The shooting ranges are just as good as before, if not better. The backgrounds are now real-world environments with the game pasted on top of them, it looks a bit odd, but it really does work very well. All the levels are fast paced and terrific fun. Another fan favourite from the original, the music-based games, return once more but with a difference. You can now pick from a number of different instruments to play along with and all the tracks are now sung by a small Rabbid choir. Odd, but wonderfully entertaining. All the humour is still intact from the original with various cutscenes breaking up the action and providing the game with some much needed structure.

We’ve never encountered a game that can go from the dire to the delightful quite so effortlessly. In single player, this is a below average, badly made and poorly conceived Wii title. In multiplayer mode, it is occasionally inspired but mostly passable. A good example is a minigame that sees you have to balance a platter of food and deliver to to a Rabbid. In multiplayer mode you get the chance to knock over your fellow players by bumping into them. In single player mode it is just you...and your food. In contrast, this is about as boring as watching paint dry with a blindfold on.

Ubisoft have made the crucial error of messing with a formula that was never broken. They’ve gone for style over substance and failed spectacularly. The sheen and style of the game is perhaps better than before, but the new minigames are so mind-numbingly dull and often easy to complete that you’ll be left with a rather foul taste in your mouth. If you didn’t enjoy the original, then you’re not going to enjoy this. If you did enjoy the original, you’d probably be well advised to just keep playing it and ignore this unless you have some very Rabbid-loving buddies.