Ubisoft's $40 Rayman Remake Looks Stunning, But Struggles to Justify Its Existence

Ubisoft is betting forty dollars that you've forgotten how good Rayman Legends is, or that you never played it in the first place. The company, reeling from a brutal corporate restructuring that cost hundreds of developers their jobs at the start of 2026, is reaching back to one of its foundational franchises with Rayman Legends Retold, a remake of the 2013 platformer that arrives October 1st across PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X/S. The original game still plays beautifully. It still looks good. You can buy it on Steam for six dollars or less whenever it goes on sale, which is often. So the question hanging over this remake is not whether it's competent—it clearly is—but whether it exists for anyone at all.

Ubisoft's pitch is that Legends Retold is more than a cosmetic refresh. The company, working through two teams at Ubisoft Milan and Ubisoft Montpellier, claims the project amounts to a wholesale rebuilding of Rayman's foundations. The remake runs on the latest Snowdrop Engine and promises ray tracing at 60 frames per second even on the Switch 2. The art direction shifts toward a 2.5D presentation with three-dimensional elements, giving each level visual depth the original lacked. Composer Christophe Heral returns alongside Grant Kirkhope to rework the audio design. The cutscenes are entirely redone with new voice acting, though returning performers are included as well. These are genuine enhancements, not window dressing.

But the real additions are the new gameplay elements. A sixth world called The Land of the Living Dead introduces a new ability called The Power of Light, though details remain scarce ahead of launch. More immediately striking are the Dragon Rides—sequences where players mount a creature that resembles something from How to Train Your Dragon and navigate through obstacles while flying between regions. The remake also adds four-player online co-op, a feature the original never had, alongside the existing local couch co-op. A hands-on preview of a work-in-progress build suggested the Dragon Rides concept is solid, though the remote cloud-streaming setup made it difficult to judge how the feature will feel on actual hardware.

The core problem is one of audience. Who is this remake for? Players who never touched the original and somehow prefer to spend forty dollars on a remake rather than six on the original game itself? Fans of Rayman Legends who specifically want online multiplayer badly enough to repurchase the game? There's no obvious answer. The original remains accessible on modern platforms. It hasn't aged poorly. The value proposition collapses under scrutiny. Rumors suggest Ubisoft might bundle an enhanced edition of Rayman Origins with Legends Retold, which would add some weight to the package, but those reports emerged after the preview period and received no official confirmation. Even if true, Origins is another beloved game that already looks great and plays well on current hardware.

The remake's existence makes more sense when viewed through the lens of Ubisoft's broader crisis. The company has spent years chasing live-service success with middling results. Rainbow Six Siege became a genuine hit, but most other attempts—XDefiant among them—failed to capture the scale Ubisoft wanted. The company is now in the midst of a major reset, reorganizing into Creative Houses and laying off hundreds of developers. In this context, remakes of classic franchises serve a dual purpose: they're relatively safer bets than new IP, and they potentially lay groundwork for future live-service reinventions. Whether Ubisoft would actually attempt to turn Rayman into a live-service game remains unclear, but the company's hunger for a Fortnite-sized hit has never diminished. These remakes could be stepping stones toward that goal, or they could simply be attempts to revive dormant franchises for new audiences.

What Legends Retold actually accomplishes in its new sixth world and refined mechanics will matter. The preview build was too early and too limited to judge whether the new content justifies the price. The Dragon Rides felt charming but unpolished. The Power of Light ability remains mysterious. The real test comes at launch, when players can experience the full package. For now, Rayman Legends Retold stands as a well-intentioned remake in search of a reason to exist—a beautiful reminder of how good the original was, but not necessarily a compelling reason to buy it again.