Far from ushering in a new dawn of innovation, the arrival of Nintendo’s Wii (apart from first-party releases, obviously) has been characterised more by shoehorned arm waving as much as anything else. The likes of Far Cry, Splinter Cell and The Godfather have all put in money-making appearances, crippled either by unwieldy controls or mini-games where you dance about to kneecap someone, or something. Like trapping your fingers in a door, it all jarred rather uncomfortably. So, does the conversion process work in reverse? If Rayman Raving Rabbids is anything to go by, the answer is ‘no’.

It’s not that the overall concept lacks potential. After all, though we’re not lacking a party title, we’re certainly short of a good one (here’s looking at you, Fuzion Frenzy 2). Instead, trouble stems from Ubisoft’s steadfast refusal to alter either control system or minigame content, robbing RRR of the control freshness it basically inherits on Nintendo’s console and making many of its mini-games so simple that each multiplayer contest would likely end in a draw. Put simply, the whole thing has been shoved out of the door with minimum fuss and consideration for its eventual home. The examples are numerous. One mini-game sees you at the seafront, closing mischievous toilet doors behind a quartet of forgetful bunnies. Obviously, on the Wii you’d simply point and press buttons as things get heated, but here you’re constantly fighting against an analogue-only input system, scrolling through the selectable doors one by one. It’s painful stuff, and not an isolated incident, either. Another challenge sees you tracing the outline of various consumables ready for another gluttonous creature to gobble. Great fun across the format divide, but mapped to a face button and analogue stick? We’ve had more fun navigating the dashboard.

While we could continue to waffle on with further examples of such madness, in reality there’s no need as this spear of shame has two further prongs. First, there are simply far too many outings demanding no more than track-and-field style button-bashery, moreover of the kind that can easily be maxed out, leaving multiplayer worthless. What’s more, for a dedicated mini-game outing there are quite simply too many dull memory tests/maze puzzles disguised to appear different from each other. Which they, of course, are not.

Continuing down the devil’s jockstrap list comes this little nugget: only Sonic The Hedgehog rivals Rayman Raving Rabbids for sheer volume of time sat before the screen, gazing into the distance. Roughly a quarter of your single-player time will be spent staring at continuity screens, with the infamous load, ten-second introduction, load trilogy of doom putting in another unwelcome appearance. This hits home especially hard when you’ve gathered a few friends round; the typically sub-minute action would certainly benefit from a little swift chopping and changing. Not that the action ever gets any more tactically deep than you might hope to achieve with pen and paper, anyway – the game does little more than keep score as players choose which challenge to tackle next. Sometimes though, you wonder why you entered into such a charade at all. One minigame in particular, asking players to launch their pucks simultaneously over a square ice block in the hope of finishing dead centre, seems so hopelessly random, Willie Thorne would be tearing his hair out in frustration. One little irony that might be added to the pile comes through the bizarre order the mini-games are presented forth. Those least difficult/most obviously designed with Wii in mind feature first, with the dozen or so showing some promise shuffled off to the rear, ready not to trouble most people, who’ll quickly tire of the opening dross. A swift swapping exercise involving the order in which mini-games are released would have probably propelled the experience into somewhere approaching mediocrity, but clearly even this amount of customtailoring was too much to ask.

This review may read like death by a thousand cuts, each fault seeming just insufficient to tip the scales of justice into the toilet of failure. If you’ve more money than sense, this is probably a good point, as the striking visual and audio design proves pretty enough to encourage play until the final fresh asset has grown old. Trouble is, once this happens (after around four hours), you’ve paid £35 for basically a digital art exhibit. With replay value practically nonexistent, that really isn’t good enough. As a vehicle to demonstrate an interesting control method, you couldn’t really hope for a more polished first try. Back in console gaming’s traditional heartland, there isn’t even a word to express how dated it feels.

Dave Shaw