Masem’s Gaming Blog

Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 by Ubisoft follows up on their party hit from last year, and does a good job of introducing new games and fixing a few problems that were present in the first game. While the overall game experience isn’t much from the single player standpoint, it’s a good game to have in your virtual backpocket to have available should you be hanging around with friends.

Review Helpfulness: (2 votes, average: 3.50 out of 5)
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Gameplay: A-

As with the first game, Rabbids 2 is primarily a collection of mini/party games that utilize the Wii remote and nunchuck. In this iteration, the games are grouped into 5 tours that cover certain continents of the world and that “inspire” the 9 minigames within the tour, but otherwise is just a means of characterizing the games. However, once you’ve played and unlocked games, you can create your own world tour for both solo and group play.

Each game is presented with brief instructions of how to play it before you start, allowing newcomers to the game to learn what they need to do. However, a significantly improved change is that these games are now based only on score and not on whether you succeed or fail at a task (for example, the first game had a minigame that you had to squirt juice at advancing Rabbids before they touched you, otherwise you failed the game). This makes it much easier for everyone to enjoy the game (all games appear to feature simultaneous play in multiplayer mode) since they can’t fail out after one difficult task, just that their score will be lower. The games here generally last from 30 seconds to a minute or so, enough to get used to the mechanic but rarely long enough to feel boring. One of the more interesting minigames is the Rock Band-lite game featured at the end of each tour. Using a Rabbid-sung version of a popular song (such as “Satisfaction” or “Celebration”) you shake the remote and nunchuck in time to the music, which each player on a different instrument. It’s certainly not as deep as Rock Band, but it is one of the funner games in the package. Another nice touch is that the game integrates with network scoreboards to allow you to put up your best scores for minigames and world tour results, thought this is always an option.

Completing the world tours and other minigames will unlock extra outfits for your characters as well as the shooting minigame among various locales as was present in the first game. Beyond those aspects, there’s not much else to the game – but given that the game purports to be not much more than a party game, this is quite reasonable.

Value/Replayability: B

There’s about 50 minigames in the game, and while many of these are amusing for a few times through, they’re really only stay fresh if played with a party – they do get rather stale quickly in single player mode.

Graphics: B

The game continues to use their “Rabbids” in bizarre situations and parodies. There’s nothing really wrong with the graphics, but they just don’t seem as smooth or clean as other Wii titles can be. But they certainly don’t distract from the gameplay.

Audio: B

The music for the game is fine, and helps to support the minigames but otherwise nothing extraordinary. The rabbids still make their distinctive “daaah” sound that make them “adorable” but otherwise, the effects are appropriate for the games.

Overall: B+

Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 is a good followup to the first game, and works well as a party game for the Wii console utilizing the features of the remote. It does fix a few annoyances from the first game, making it easier to unlock all the minigames, but otherwise is not much else is different. If you enjoyed playing the first with friends, you’ll probably enjoy this version but doesn’t offer much for just the single player game.

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