Ubisoft’s Rayman Legends is available for free on Epic Games Store from now until December 6. Interested players should act fast before the game is replaced by Jotun: Valhalla Edition — next week’s Epic Games Store freebie.
Rayman Legends is the fifth installment in the long-running franchise, and is the latest mainline Rayman game. The co-op platformer released to universal acclaim in 2013, but sales fell short of Ubisoft’s expectations. PC Invasion’s own Tim McDonald showered it with praise six years ago, calling it “one of the best platform games.” While poor sales meant Rayman and his floating appendages haven’t been up to much as of late, free is a pretty fair price to revisit an last-gen gem.
Epic Games Store is also running a Black Friday sale this week with a few other solid platformers on sale.
The legend of the Rayman
The Rayman series is the brainchild of acclaimed game designer Michel Ancel. Along with Ancel’s Beyond Good & Evil, Rayman has become somewhat of a legend in the Ubisoft catalog. And just like Beyond Good & Evil, the series seen long, long periods of drought. Eight years after the third entry, Ubisoft released Rayman Origins with Ancel back in the director’s chair. Origins reinvigorated both series and genre, gathering enough steam on its own to warrant another entry. The result was Rayman Legends, which took the core of Origins and polished it to a shine.
In 2011, Ubisoft expressed satisfaction with the sales performance of Rayman Origins, despite it moving only 50,000 copies during its US release week. Oddly enough, Rayman Legends outsold Origins, approaching one million units sold in three months, but failed to meet sales expectations. It was far from a commercial failure, but the lack of mainline entries since 2013 is mildly concerning.
However, sales figures don’t take away from the fact that Rayman Legends was a phenomenal platformer. Snag a copy of Rayman Legends for free this week and save it for a rainy day.
