The cinematic opening to a video game needs to excite the player, but it also needs to inform the players of what to expect. Make it too exciting and people may be disappointed about the actual game. The opening of Rayman Arena depicts an interesting concept: it’s an on-foot race that can turn into an all-out battle at any point, before you need to start racing again. Seems like a neat concept. Get into the main menu and you’ll quickly notice that racing and battling are completely independent from each other.
I want to get the battles out of the way first. They’re horrible. You just hit each other, respawning when you lose all your hearts and the person with the highest number of hits at the end of the obscenely long matches wins. There are power ups across the level, but it’s best to completely ignore them, as Arena has a very accurate lock on mechanic. Lock on and fire as quickly as possible and no opponent will be able to keep up, then just keep blasting them as they respawn.
Racing is a little bit better, but feels very much on-rails. There are different routes to choose from, but the races never get exciting. One thing that doesn’t help is that your character has “speed trails”, which makes the slowness of the game even more absurd. The levels themselves look nice visually, but it just feels like the game is playing itself. If this game was a minigame in a main Rayman game, it might be acceptable, but as its own game, it’s not good at all. Strangely, the GameCube and Xbox versions were not released in Europe (the PS2 version was called Rayman M over here).