Rayman Raving Rabbids Review

That's carrot juice you're pumping into their visors. Not urine. That would be horrible.

Raving Rabbids dispenses with every established Rayman character except the limbless nonce himself, allowing the titular Rabbids to take centre stage. Rayman is kidnapped by these ridiculous little sado-masochists at the beginning of the game and forced to perform for their entertainment, which provides the somewhat flimsy justification for the fifty-odd consecutive minigames that make up the story mode. The Rabbids themselves account for a lot of this game's appeal - unlike the rest of the Rayman universe, they are instantly likeable. Expressive and often hilarious, their over-the-top screaming, vacant stares and bizarre design are certain to provoke a laugh - they are perfect characters for movement-based slapstick comedy, which is exactly what Raving Rabbids is all about.

The mini-games themselves cover everything from basic rhythm-action to on-rails shooting to drawing shapes on the screen, although a tediously large proportion of them employ the same vigororous-shaking-with-one-hand-whilst-pointing-with-the-other control method. They range from the reasonably normal - cow-throwing, say, or free-falling, or annihilating a level full of Rabbids with a plunger gun - to the completely deranged and frankly terrifying (there's one where you have to carry a pig around a minefield whilst horrible demonic voices and anguished squeals emanate disturbingly from the Wiimote's little speaker). You'd think that waving and shaking could be stretched to the very limits of their entertainment capabilities in maybe ten different games, but there are more than forty completely unique ones here and a good measure of them are ingenious. Twisting left and right steers a bird through the air in one game, tilting the Wiimote around guides a ball around a maze in another; some require you to just wave like a madman, whilst others demand precision and patience. It's difficult to fault Raving Rabbids' variety, except to say that the mini-games begin to repeat themselves rather more than is acceptable towards the end of the story (which, by the way, has the most unexpectedly sinister ending I've seen in a long while).

You can change about Rayman's outfits for funsies - when you select 'gangsta', he magically becomes black.

Having seen that ending, though, you have seen everything that Raving Rabbids has to offer, and that really is the crux of the matter. It's a reasonably long sequence of minigames, and those games are intuitive, inventive and often very funny, but that's all there is to it. This will not entertain any discerning gamer for very long at all, especially not on your own. It needs to be played in a group, where people can take turns at the games and laugh together at the madcap humour. Its value is as an introduction to the Wii, a launch title to show friends and family and have a bit of fun with before going back to something more substantive. It fulfils that role admirably, but expect anything more from it and you will find yourself disappointed. In that sense, it's rather like a more expansive version of Wii Play.

I'm very conflicted with Raving Rabbids. In a year's time, when we'll probably have mini-game-heavy Wii party games coming out of our ears, Raving Rabbids may well be sitting at the back of the shelf, never to be touched again. It's so very, very simple and essentially basic that it somehow feels wrong to enjoy it. I am not at all convinced that this sort of motion-based mini-game tomfoolery is going to retain its novelty for more than a couple of months, and with Wario Ware: Smooth Moves on the horizon it's difficult to recommend this as a definitive party game.