Rabbids Land

Genre: Party Game

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local)

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: UbiSoft

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Review:

Rabbids Land, released on Wii U in 2012, is the Wii U entry in Ubisoft’s Rayman spinoff franchise featuring comical screaming rabbit-like creatures. This amusement park-themed game has players taking the role of one of these creatures in a Party Game setting, with players competing in minigames and moving around on a board game-like map in a manner comparable to the Mario Party series.

The presentation in this game isn’t bad, but it’s nothing special, either. The cartoony rabbids and their whimsical world are both rendered in full 3D, and while the world has a lot of personality, there’s nothing that impresses on a technical level. And in terms of sound, expect a bouncy soundtrack that fits the game’s silly theming but isn’t at all memorable. Oh, and screaming, lots of screaming.

This gets to my first major complaint about this game. I realize that the rabbids are a “love it or hate it” sorta’ character, and ordinarily I actually find them amusing and even a bit charming. However, in this game, my amusement wore thin pretty quickly. The issue isn’t the base slapstick that defines these characters, but how repetitive that slapstick is here. Every single turn in the game, players roll the dice, always resulting in the die slamming down on the Rabbid, cue scream. While it may have been amusing the first one or two times, it soon became tiresome, and I just wanted to skip that part and move on with the game.

Unfortunately, the gameplay itself doesn’t fare much better. There’s only one game board, which by Mario Party’s standards is absolutely pathetic. And the list of minigames here is similarly pathetic, with roughly 20 minigames (with a few of those having two or three additional variations). Given that Mario Party games can feel a bit slim with a hundred minigames, the few dozen in this game feels outright anemic.

Another issue here is that the pacing in the game’s board is dreadfully slow. Players will not always kick off a minigame in every turn, and even when they do these minigames are invariably only between two players, making everyone else wait. You can’t opt to simply play with fewer than four players, either – the game will fill missing slots with computer-controlled rabbids, ensuring that the pacing remains as slow as possible.

The minigames themselves do at least make good use of the Wii U gamepad’s unique features, making use of the touchscreen, the gyroscopic motion control, even the microphone. However, more often than not these minigames were more gimmicky than fun, and very frequently they felt one-sided.

Even Rabbids franchise fans will likely want to skip Rabbids Land. It’s terribly low on content, and what charm and humor is here gets quickly stamped out due to how repetitive the game is. If you’re looking for a great Party Game on Wii U, go with Nintendoland or Mario Party 10, not this dreadful slog of a game.

tl;dr – Rabbids Land is a Party Game featuring the screaming rabbit-like Rabbids competing in a board game-like arena in a theme park. While the core concept is sound enough, the game is repetitive, poorly-paced, and horribly lacking in content. If you’re looking for a great Party Game on Wii U, you have multiple other, better choices. Don’t bother with this one.

Grade: D+

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