Rayman Mini

It may not be a core entry within the Rayman franchise, but this polished runner looks just as good as the other series games to date and is a swell way to pass time in bite-sized chunks. Rayman Mini is beautiful, with intricately designed levels, wonderfully detailed characters, and great animations. It's significantly smaller than most Rayman games -- levels are short and sweet, ideal for playing while waiting for the next bus stop or waiting in the car -- but the emphasis on replaying levels means many players will likely end up spending plenty of time trying to perfect their scores. The controls are simple but effective, ensuring that failure rests with player performance rather than any fault of the game. And while failure will send you back to the start of a level, progress is rarely foiled, since all you need do is complete a handful of levels to unlock the next world.

What could bother some franchise fans, though, is the inability to control Rayman's movement. In most Rayman games, you have time to strategize prior to taking on enemies and obstacles, and you can go back and try multiple times to collect missed collectibles. But a missed Lum in Rayman Mini is a missed Lum. The only way to go back and gather it is to start the level over from scratch. This is supposed to be part of the challenge, but players used to side-scrolling games with a little more freedom could find it frustrating, at least to start. Rayman Mini isn't a classic Rayman game, and it isn't meant to be. It's a purpose-designed mobile game made to fill empty bits of time in your day. So long as you go in understanding this, it's hard to imagine many Rayman fans being too disappointed.