“Rayman 2: The Great Escape” comes to the App Store

There’s reason enough to arch a wry eyebrow at yet another classic platformer with a virtual control overlay ported to the App Store, and Gameloft’s newest iPhone gaming release, Rayman 2: The Great Escape is no exception, even at $6.99.

The original game was something of an unsung masterpiece when it was released back in 1999. I personally loved it: it felt like the first 3D platformer to really grok what Super Mario 64 had done, and add to it.

Tentative excitement on this end, then, to revisit a beloved game of my teen years… but, as usual, it looks like Gameloft has gummed up the controls. The issue with porting this kind of game to the iPhone OS is that, even when the game was released, it had a sometimes maddening to control camera… and that was with dedicated camera control buttons, as well as triggers that can be squeezed to lock on to enemies. Gameloft’s solution seems to have been to allow the user to rotate the camera and lock on to enemies using multitouch swiping and pinching motions… which just adds an additional level of convoluted finickiness to an already bad camera scheme.

According to Toucharcade, the problems with this Rayman 2 port don’t end there, either: the game will unceremoniously dump you to the beginning of the level if you need to leave the game for any reason. Perhaps not a big deal for iPod Touch users, but if you’re on an iPhone, there’s a lot of reasons beyond your control why you might need to exit the program.

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Overall, it looks like Rayman 2 is hard to recommend, which is a shame: this really is a classic platformer that deserved a second lease-on-life on the iPhone.

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