Rayman Legends

Rayman Origins isn't my favourite game of all time, but it might the one that comes closest to being genuinely perfect; there isn't a single thing I'd change about it, and I find it basically impossible to imagine a game in the same genre being better. So the question for Rayman Legends is one that's simple to ask but impossible to answer. How on Earth do you follow up perfection?

As much as we all want innovation and to experience something new, I would have happily accepted a game that was essentially identical to Origins, but I can absolutely understand why Ubisoft didn't do it (they were liable to have been criticized for it in the first wave of reviews if nothing else, and game publishers notoriously put far too much stress on Metacritic scores). So instead, there is an attempt to add new features and add twists to the existing mechanics.

Some of these additions are fine. The new online features, which include weekly challenges and leaderboards, is great for those who like that sort of thing and easily ignored for those who don't, and the wider variety of characters to play as is nice. However, it's hard not to feel at various points that the teams that developed this simply tried too hard to interfere with a great thing. The absolute nadir of this is the final level, where the screen flips upside down, splits into multiple identical sections, gets put through a wide angle lens, gets completely bitcrushed, goes black and white and gets completely covered with static.....all while you're flying through a level where literally any sort of mistake will see you die. It's absolutely fucking horrible, and I'm truly gobsmacked that anybody thought any of this was a good idea. The game simply cannot have been focus tested if this garbage slipped through the net into the final product. The final level of Rayman Origins was seriously difficult too, and finally completing it perfectly was honestly one of the most fulfilling experiences I can remember ever having in a game, so the developers are clearly capable of composing a final challenge that isn't a complete bag of wank. How and why, then, did they arrive at this?