Rabbids Go Home

(title card coming... hopefully soon)

They... sleep on lights?

First they invaded Rayman’s world. Then they invaded the “human world” (or something similar to it, anyway). Then, they invaded human culture. That’s when Rayman got tired of being the second fiddle, and left back to the Glade of Dreams. But we weren’t done with these guys, oh no. They are still in the human world, and they have developed a new obsession: The Moon!

Rabbids Go Home was developed by Ubisoft Montpellier and released for the Wii on November 1^st, 2009. Things are going to get weird, but hey, I’m coming for the ride, as long as it’s better than last week’s game.

"This is the biggest round street light I have ever seen!
Let's go sleep on it!" 

Life goes on normally for the humans, while their invaders have found refuge in the junkyard. It’s nighttime, and the moon is full. So large, in fact, that there’s probably another part of the world suffering from a tidal wave or something. The Rabbids suddenly notice the Moon, and (we assume) they decide they want to be on it. I’d love to analyze that train of thought, but these are the Rabbids we’re talking about: That train derails every 2 minutes. And yet, with this idea, they all decide to team up!

Level 1, the tutorial, takes place in the junkyard. You’re taught the basics: Run around in the shopping cart, gather items, follow the path. When you see the Rabbid with the tuba, hand over all of your collected items to it. Need to break something? Shake the Nunchuk to BWAAAH very loudly – it’s so loud, it can destroy stuff AND scare the clothes off every human struck by the soundwaves. The idea is to collect as many items as possible.

It's a good thing the items are helpfully circled on the screen!
Though I'm worried about that neon green nuclear waste all over the place.

After gathering plenty of items in the junkyard, the bunnies realize they need more. They can see the city from their makeshift residence, and thus decide to go there to get what they need. And so, we find ourselves in a shopping mall, learning a few other gameplay mechanics (you can take pictures with the C button on the Nunchuk).

Yes, really. Here's proof. Now, why you'd take photos if
you can't ahre them...

Don't worry about it. It'll be fine.

This wouldn’t be a Rabbids game if they didn’t break the fourth wall until it’s in tatters. This time around, you have a bunny in your Wii remote! Yes. There’s a mode in which you can suck into your remote one of three main bunnies. After which, you can customize it and bash it around to your heart's desire. It’ll be alright, it’s too stupid to comprehend the concept of pain. Is this removed from the main game? Not entirely. The customization on these bunnies will appear on the cart-driving and cart-riding Rabbids in-game. Also, by pointing the cursor on the screen and pressing Z, you can throw the third bunny (also customized to your will) at various items and enemies, and knock them out. Fastbunny special! The three customizable bunnies are, respectively, the shopping cart’s driver, the one inside the cart, and the one who gets flung at obstacles with Z.

f you play with a friend, they can pick up items for you
with their Wii remote!

This escapade in the shopping mall brings the first actual enemies: Barking dogs (which are KO’d by Bwaaah-ing and can then be collected) and a cleaner robot whose entire purpose is to put back in place any and every item that has been taken off the shelves. Allow me to question the usefulness of a robot like that in a shopping mall where the entire point is to buy items... by taking them off the shelves in the first place. This level ends when the Rabbids find a woman in a very UFO-looking vehicle, and take the vehicle along to make the pile, soon to be buried. With the woman still inside. She’s probably gonna die. That’s saying nothing of all the other living creatures (octopi, dogs, crabs, chickens) you gather as normal objects, left in the junkyard as just more stuff to build the pile. Sweet dreams, kids!

NeatBot, leave me alone! I'm taking everything!
It's the kleptomaniac's way of cleaning!

They literally stole something with a person inside of it
and are gonna bury that person alive under a pile of trash!

So, what we have here is a collect-a-thon, a racing game, a platform game, or a puzzle game? All of the above. You get special dressup items whenever you collect enough objects, and can use those to customize your bunnies. To get 100% completion, you have to collect every single item in every single level. That should keep one busy for a while!

As time goes, you unlock new customization options for your bunny: You can then change the shape of its head (smaller and rounder, or taller and lankier), the size of its eyes and ears (make them all tiny, or huge), paint all over its body (or use tattoos and such), or put something it can wear on its head, like an octopus or a swordfish. You can even save the Rabbids created that way, and share them with your friends!

So close to the objective... and yet, so far...

The supermarket? A hospital? The park? A construction site? The farm? No place is sacred. They’re gonna steal a patient in intensive care if they want to! They can even Bwaaah to make people fall down elevator shafts – their cruelty is YOUR cruelty. Go wild!

"Got Hurt Too Much, Or How I Lost My Damn Mind"

Of course, it’s possible to lose a life in this game. How? As I said, a Rabbid’s train of thought is fickle. The three lightbulbs on the screen represent the Rabbid’s health… sort of. They get hit, they lose a lightbulb. All three lightbulbs go out, the Rabbid goes angry and forgets what it was doing. That counts as a life loss, I guess?  Not that it matters, since you seem to have infinite lives. What does matter is that, when you lose a life, you also lose all the items you’ve collected that you haven’t saved with the tuba Rabbid – forcing you to backtrack to get what you lost. …that is, if backtracking is possible at all, because it’s not possible everywhere.

The game is unfortunately designed in such a way that
these bunnies, incapable of jumping, frequently get locked
out of past areas. Yep. These bunnies can't jump.

If there’s one thing I’m taking issue with so far, it’s that you can’t always go back to earlier parts of a level. It’s especially true as you progress through and the levels get tougher. The big item you steal is worth 600 objects, leaving about 400 items to collect around every level, for a total of 1000 “objects” in each – and these levels are humongous. It’s pretty difficult to collect everything. By the way, yes, the levels are huge. All of them. So I understand the need to have them separated in areas, with checkpoints. The big downside: Sometimes the checkpoints lock you out of the previous areas, so if you missed even one little item behind, you have to replay through the entire level again. Yeah, I can see the rationale behind the system. It still annoys me a little.

The Scaling of a Himalayas of Junk

The story goes on, and the mad bunnies have built scaffoldings to reach the top of their big pile. Meanwhile, the humans are getting fed up with these trespassers’ antics, and are arming themselves. Explosive balloons have become more common, citizens have taken to wearing stronger suits, becoming the stronger yet still somewhat ineffective Verminators. Then again, there isn’t much you can do when the bunnies are coming at you on top of a roaring, speeding plane turbine. Oh yeah, I should probably mention this: The gameplay would start to feel repetitive if they weren’t shaking it up from time to time. All you do is collect items, solve puzzles and do some platforming. Thankfully, there are special levels with gimmicks. One has the Rabbids race against a truck (as they want the cow on it), others have them ride around on a makeshift vehicle in their usual crazy fashion: A plane turbine, an air chamber… The increased difficulty, mostly done through the citizens gearing up as Verminators to fight the Rabbids, is also much welcome at this point of the game.

Who said we only had a shopping cart? Rocket-powered
locomotion is awesome!

As a matter of fact, by the end, the Hub level (the city) is probably the most dangerous place of them all. Every citizen wears a Verminator suit, the dogs have hetmets or suits, and there are Verminators of all kinds, everywhere. Thankfully, the difficulty isn’t that bad, because the Story Mode lets you collect three additional lightbulb Hit Points, for a total of 6.

And 60 is honestly not an exaggeration.
I could have said 100.

A few more things are bugging me, by the end: First, the fact that most cutscenes can’t be skipped at all. It’s annoying when you’re replaying a level to get the last few items you’ve missed the previous time, and it’s especially annoying as the game tends to re-use cutscenes whenever necessary. Expect to see that sequence of the Rabbids speeding on a mattress through the sewers at least 60 times. 

Second, you come to realize that you cannot move the camera. It’s not a big issue as it tends to stay at a place where you can see everything for your Rabbids, but that means it won’t turn on its axis or move the bunnies out of focus. It’s particularly bad in levels where you can backtrack, but the areas are filled with explosive balloons and the camera doesn’t pull back to let you see those until it’s too late and you’re already hitting them.

Those explosive balloons are everywhere in the last
levels. Also, the level this screenshot is from is called
"Fetchez la Vache". Never thought the Rabbids would
reference Monty Python, of all things.

In 10 seconds, if you don't reach the end, you will lose
everything you collected here or didn't salvage earlier.
The timer will kill your progression.

I am also bothered by the game’s tendency to strip the Rabbids of all the collected items if they don’t lose all their lightbulbs, but still “lose” in whatever area they just entered (as an example, by not reaching the finish line of an area with a timer, before the timer hits 0). Areas like the one I just described are quite common, unfortunately, which makes it extremely difficult to get all the items in a level. Even worse, those areas act as checkpoints too, so if you find yourself entering them and failing, you might as well pause and start the entire level over.

How far are we from the moon? Oh, just about 15000 feet
away. Plus a few million more.

YEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

It’s actually very easy to constantly collect over 900 items in the levels. 600 for the big one, plus at least 300 random scattered junk? Yeah, it’s simple. Finishing the level with more than 975? Also quite easy. Over 990? Fairly doable early on, trickier as you progress, pretty tough by the end. All 1000? Difficult at the start, extremely difficult at the end. All I can say is, good luck if you aim to complete the game. Now, you need 23,000 items to get the ending, but there’s more than 23 levels. You’ll comfortably reach the goal during the last levels under the 20,000 milestone. Of course, you’re encouraged to beat every level. There is a grand total of 31,750 items to collect in this game. How do I know? Because I’ve beaten the Story Mode, and that new milestone is unlocked after the final level.

The final fight, in the junkyard!

Said level is titled “King of the Pile”, and this time, the humans are fighting the Rabbids on their turf. They’re really tired of these bunnies. The humans first attack by themselves, sending a few waves of Verminators in a fight that is pretty tough, but they leave the rest to various turrets, explosive balloons, and other obstacles. You’ll want to have all six lightbulbs for that level. They’ll be needed, all of them. Eventually, your Rabbids and their cart reach the top of the pile and add the final items to it. The Rabbid on top tries to touch the Moon, thinking to be close enough, and… nothing. Can’t touch it. Yeah, we all knew that would happen. However, the humans at the bottom set up multiple bomb turrets around the pile and shoot hundreds of bombs at it. The bombs all explode at the same time, causing the pile to… rocket upwards! Loads of items fall back down, but the pile itself reaches for the stars. And so, while the humans down there look at the mess, the Rabbids find themselves launched into space, towards the Moon. Hey, seems they did it after all!

Yep. It's impossible to unlock that one at the top.

If you try to get 100% completion by collecting all 31,750 items in the game, you get a reward! It’s… just a sped-up version of the ending scene of the Rabbids floating in space towards the Moon. Cheap. Through the game, you can also unlock special, custom Rabbids disguised as characters from Ubisoft games and other media (such as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle). In a franchise that unfortunately suffers frequently from completion-related glitches, I should point out that one such unlockable Rabbid… cannot be unlocked in any way, shape or form. Weird. You will never know what that Rabbid is.

MegaMart, a subsidiary of Big Brother Co.

Okay, that says it all. Rabbids Go Home is a great, solid, funny genre-busting game. A nice departure from the mini-game formula of the others entries in the franchise. Ubisoft took on multiple genres, shoved them together into a hodgepodge that actually worked, and added a nice layer of comedy of all kinds, whether it’s the slapstick the Rabbids are known for or the subtler, darker, crueler type of comedy implied by the sheer dystopia the human world seems to be. Those speaker announcements, holy crap. The story is barebones, but it’s not like we need much of a plot: The Rabbids want to go to the moon, they build a pile to get to it, annoy the humans, and the humans gear up to fight back.

One level takes place in a nuclear reactor, and the gameplay
change involves stepping into radioactive goo to light up
the darkened rooms. Typical Rabbid humor.

The deceptively simple concept hides the surprising complexity of the gameplay. This collect-a-thon borrows from platformers, of course, but also has elements of racing and puzzle games. It encourages exploration through marathon levels with loads of secrets. The main issues are that the gameplay doesn’t offer enough variety over time (though some special levels thankfully change it up) and the long levels, split by checkpoints, don’t always let you go back to catch items you may have missed, sometimes forcing you to replay the full, grueling, long level. Cutscenes cannot be skipped, which is annoying (and yet, you can skip the end credits as soon as they start, what the Hell is up with that?).

OH MY GOD THEY ACTUALLY DID IT

Beating the game isn’t that difficult, completing it by collecting everything borders on insane difficulty. Which sounds about right. The difficulty curve is perfect, the levels are creative, in spite of a few infuriating areas and concepts. Just a shame you don’t get any proper reward for getting 100% completion. So yeah, that is all: Good stuff! Buy it, if you ever get a chance to!

And so we’ll be back to our regular non-Rabbid schedule next week. I might have to delay the next review to Sunday, though… for reasons.