Ubisoft rebuilds Rayman Legends in 3D with voice acting and a new sixth realm

Rayman Legends is the rare platformer that players cite not just as good, but as a genuine high point for the genre. The co-operative speed, the music-synchronized levels, the chaos of four players hunting Teensies through a world that never stops moving — Ubisoft Montpellier built something in 2013 that the studio has apparently found impossible to follow by simply moving forward. So they went back. Rayman Legends Retold rebuilds the game from scratch on the Snowdrop engine: same design logic, same core levels, but entirely new three-dimensional visuals and enough new content to make this something distinct from the original.

The most surprising addition is voice. Every character in Rayman Legends Retold speaks in fully voiced cinematics — Rayman, Globox, Barbara, Grand Minimus, Murphy — in a franchise that has communicated through mime and joyful gibberish for its entire existence. This is a deliberate choice, not a technical convenience. Ubisoft has kept the tone irreverent and comedic, which suggests the studio understands that dialogue here needs to feel as light and absurd as the gameplay itself. Whether actual voices add or subtract from the franchise’s anarchic charm is a question the game will have to answer when players get their hands on it.

The structural additions are harder to dismiss. A sixth realm that did not exist in the 2013 original arrives with new level sets built specifically for the three-dimensional visual language of the Snowdrop engine. Four new musical stages expand the portion of the game that made Legends a conversation-stopper — these are the levels where every jump and roll was timed to a specific bar of music, and where a missed beat felt like a personal betrayal of the track. Composer Christophe Héral, who created the original score, returns alongside Grant Kirkhope to expand the soundtrack throughout the new content. The Cave of Bad Dreams and Cave of Trials challenge modes return with updated difficulty curves.

Co-operative play supports up to four players locally, and Kung Foot — the football-style minigame that turned groups of friends into unexpectedly competitive antagonists back in 2013 — comes back with customizable rules and improved controls. The original Kung Foot was buried in the menus, discovered mostly by accident, and inevitably hijacked entire sessions that were supposed to be about something else. That Ubisoft chose to develop it rather than simply port it is a telling sign of where the studio’s attention actually landed.

What the Snowdrop engine cannot replicate is what made the UbiArt Framework’s rendering distinctive. Rayman Legends was a landmark of two-dimensional art direction: the way costume textures caught light, the parallax layers that moved at different depths behind each level, the hand-crafted feel of every animated frame. Moving to three dimensions is not an upgrade in any simple sense — it is a different aesthetic vocabulary, and one that does not automatically carry over the original’s tactile warmth. The trailer shows a capable, energetic game. It does not yet show whether the kinetic joy of the original survives the translation. At $39.99, the game positions itself below standard retail price: this is a reimagining for returning fans and a gateway for newcomers, not a premium experience claiming to surpass the source.

Rayman Legends Retold launches October 1 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC via Ubisoft Connect, Steam, and the Epic Games Store. It will also be available through the Ubisoft+ subscription service and on GeForce Now and Blacknut cloud platforms at launch.

Tags: gaming, Ubisoft, Platformer, Rayman, Rayman Legends Retold, Ubisoft Montpellier