Rayman Legends

Rayman Legends arrived on Xbox One in 2014 and stands as arguably the best hand-drawn platformer of its era. It follows on from Rayman Origins, keeping its supple controls and expanding them with new ideas: besides running and jumping, you rescue trapped Teensies, tunnel through walls, swim, fly, and in some levels control a helper who clears obstacles for you. The game is built around fluidity of movement — once you find a level's rhythm, it turns into one long, uninterrupted run, and that feeling is the main reward. Each world also has tougher level variants for players who want a real challenge.

Technically, Legends runs on the UbiArt Framework engine, which makes the characters and backgrounds look like an animated film. On Xbox One the game runs in high resolution with a completely stable frame rate, a necessity for precise jumps. The most celebrated parts are the musical levels at the end of each world, where the entire environment is synced to cover versions of famous tunes and every jump, hit, and explosion lands exactly on the beat. The rest of the soundtrack mixes orchestral motifs with bizarre sounds, and together with the art style creates moods ranging from a fairy-tale forest to an underwater temple. Four-player couch co-op turns the game into loud fun where you keep getting in each other's way.

Rayman Legends earned excellent scores after release and is often ranked among the pinnacles of modern-era 2D platformers. Besides the main campaign, it also offers reworked levels from the previous entry and daily and weekly challenges with leaderboards, so there's an unusually large amount of content. The game showed that a classic 2D platformer can still have a solid place in an era of huge 3D worlds, and its visual style influenced many later titles. Today it still feels just as fresh as at launch, since hand-drawn graphics barely age, and on Xbox One it remains one of the safest family picks.