Review: Rabbids Big Bang
Rabbids in Orbit
Rabbids Big Bang, the space-rabbit-launching action-puzzler from Ubisoft, was just updated for MFi controller support.
Fans of the Angry Birds Space Games will feel right at home here. While Rabbids doesn’t feel quite like a clone or knock-off, the gameplay is familiar and objectives similar. You launch your character, you navigate around gravity, you collect goal and try to get a high score – straightforward stuff for mobile games.
Rabbids shakes things up a little bit by adding a little more direct control over your animal-projectiles. The biggest innovation is the jetpack, which allows you to steer your Rabbid. Because you start the round by hitting him into orbit with a baseball bat, there’s a certain degree of spin to your character. Timing when to trigger your jetpack in accordance with which direction your character is facing adds an interesting dimension to the gameplay. Limited fuel and planetary gravity require you to act reasonably fast, which makes timing a significant factor. It’s in interesting twist to the formula, and I think quite a successful one.
On a technical level, Rabbids does not disappoint. The graphics are solid, the framerate is smooth, and the music and sound design clever. Controller support is reasonably well implemented, with both Standard and Extended format MFi controllers supported both in-game and in the menus.
The biggest negative here are the in-game ads. Quite simply, pop-up ads in a paid game are unacceptable. Making money off of gamers, then turning around and selling those gamers to advertisers is a sleazy, amoral business practice. From a strictly practical perspective, these ads (marked as “Urgent News”) are impossible to dismiss without reaching out and touching the close button on your screen – in other words, an inconvenience for iPad gamers looking to play this game with the SteelSeries Stratus controller, and a black mark on the game.
Ultimately, Rabbids Big Bang is fun. It’s a little unoriginal, but it isn’t exactly a direct copy of anything else; Rabbids establishes an identity of it’s own. If the ads were removed, it would be an easy recommendation. As it is, the App Store is full of great games with more respect for their players – take it as you will.