Geekscape Games Reviews Raving Rabbids Travel in Time (3DS)

Rayman who? These Rabbids have all but stolen the spotlight from the limbless hero that they were spun off from. For the most part, they’ve stayed off of his platforming turf and stuck to party games and a brief detour to the world of Katamari-esque item collecting. But the time for partying has come to an end. While Tavel in Time on the Wii was a party game, the 3DS version is a 2D sidescroller that seems to be filling a gap. Much like Rayman 3D gave a 3D platformer to a system from a company known for platformers, Travel in Time is looking to do the same for 2D. It’s a huge task to live up to, but the Rabbids already toppled one platforming icon. Can they do it again?

Those crazy Rabbids are at it again, (if you still care.) When they find a time traveling washing machine, they accidentally get sent back to various areas throughout different periods, where they change history in order to get back to the present. Playing across four different eras and over 60 levels in total, Travel in Time provides plenty of platforming goodness complete with collectables and lots and lots of coins. It just takes awhile before the goodness is found.

After all the punishment the Rabbids put themselves through, it’s obvious that they’re pretty durable. Aside from pits and getting crushed, it’s all but impossible to die in the game. Health can be found everywhere and the game gives you a huge health bar that only increases as you go on. All of the enemies are other Rabbids with similar attack patterns so they’re never much of an issue either. Actually, the only hard part of the game is actually getting through the boredom of the first few hours.

I don’t want to say that the game is a bad platformer, because it works the way its meant to. But it wouldn’t have killed Ubisoft to make the first two worlds at least slightly interesting. The 3D effect is barely used so when the visuals are a non factor, all that’s left is the game itself. The stages all look the same and the first half of the game is so painfully routine that you’ll feel like you’ve played the game a throusand times before. It hardly helps that the game itself doesn’t do much to change the formula of jumping on and over stuff for at least three hours in. I wouldn’t blame you for giving up or napping during game play, since continuing is the most challenging part. It’s hard to believe that characters with such quirkyness have so much trouble keeping a person’s attention.

Both platformers and Rabbids games have a tradition of having tons of unlockables, and Travel in Time is no different. All of the enemies are seen wearing outfits from their respective time. Attacking them in different ways gives you parts of their clothes so you can customize your own character in goofy fashions. Racking up points unlocks 3D figurines, (that aren’t really all that 3D,) as well as bonus stages. And if you can actually fathom the thought, puzzle pieces can be unlocked by completing missions and time trials when you replay stages over again. Yup, that’s right. Replay value is good, but I really can’t imagine playing these stages more than once. Hell, I could barely imagine playing them all the way through at all.

I was honestly excited at the thought of a Rabbids platformer, especially after how well the first attempt at adding Rabbids to a non-party game went. Instead, I got an uninteresting platformer that does everything by the numbers instead of taking inspiration from the crazy characters the game was designed around. With tedious stages and a laughable difficulty, Ubisoft will have to try a lot harder to make its mark on the house that Mario built, especially at his home genre. Next time the Rabbids find a time machine, let’s hope they learn from the past and make a better game.