And here we round out the Rayman 3 era of games; it’s much shorter than Rayman 2 with its many spinoffs. And even this group can’t shake a deep connection to Rayman 2, despite my feelings that each numbered entry was fairly distinct. For example, Hoodlums’ Revenge once again bases its soundtrack mainly off of Eric Chevalier’s R2 score (for the fourth unique game since R2 itself). Make no mistake, it’s in the R3 mold through and through, but it also reintroduces Yellow Lums as a collectible (they also replace yellow gems as the low-value pickup ideal for starting a combo) as well as Green Lums as checkpoints, and Blue Lums as they appeared in Rayman 3 GBA, but now paired with the Throttle Copter powerup can. As with R3GBA, it enhances the connection between the games and makes the world feel more full and alive.
Unfortunately the game itself is mediocre at best. It’s ambitious as a pseudo-3D isometric platformer on a system not powerful enough to do true 3D satisfactorily, like Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge, but it just doesn’t work too well. I guess Backbone felt it necessary to restrict the levels to right angles to aid the platforming, but it makes the world feel artificial in the process, a problem none of Rayman’s games have had so far. Even then, it’s difficult to determine your position and height relative to the ground, which coupled with the somewhat dodgy hit detection makes the game frustrating to play.
Water is now deadly to Rayman apparently. There’s a mercy in that you take only minor damage from landing in it once and can bounce back out, but the second or third bounce will invariably kill you. This does let them introduce the new mechanic of the coracle-style boat, as well as the fire immunity can for running on lava. Speaking of new gameplay, Globox is playable here, either solo or in some levels you can switch between them to solve puzzles. It’s a nice addition and gives that same feeling of buddies on an adventure that Rayman 3 had (the plot rehashes R3 pretty shamelessly). But Globox is slow and gets spooked by Hoodlums; you must drink plum juice to hit them. It’s not as fun playing as him since he has less options, but at least he doesn’t have to make tricky jumps and can’t fall into water.
Despite this appearance of variety, the game is quite short on content. Few levels, few music tracks, and short on visual variety in its too-bright environments. Shortness can be a virtue but the repetitive music is much less so. At least the Teensies you rescue from the requisite cages have a plethora of amusing one-liners (and they even have an unused Teensie tribe design from R3 as one of the randomly picked dialogue portraits, although the sprites are all palette swapped Minimuses).
The plot is ridiculous. Globox is possessed by Black Lum powers (for the third time), only this time it’s some kind of residual essence left by Andre from Rayman 3. As you progress he gets more belligerent as Andre influences his mind directly (which is a bit different to R3) until finally you find out that he’s been transformed somehow into a clone of Reflux. Which makes no sense. There’s also a lava monster boss that looks exactly like a Knaaren for some reason. There is some amusing dialogue between a temporarily-aggressive Globox and an unobservant Rayman but there’s little explanation for the Hoodlum activity, etc.
So Hoodlums’ Revenge is an attempt at a handheld Rayman game that’s not simply a 2D platformer, but it’s flawed in almost all areas of execution. The best I can say is “it’s fine”. Trying to keep a combo going is still engaging and combat is… well, fine, as long as you use the lock-on. As expected, it’s ultimately derivative of R3 but has its own small flourishes. It’s not good, but I guess that’s OK.
And that’s it for Rayman 3 stuff (R3GBA, R3, this, and that one Flash game). You can keep track of my Rayman Quest here. Up next we’re starting on Raving Rabbids stuff, stay tuned.
