10 Platformer Video Games Nobody Admits Are Better Than Mario

Rayman has been on the block for many a year, surviving in relatively niche circles. While you were playing Super Mario 64, your weird friend was trying to get you to play Rayman on the PS1. And yet, some 20 years later, Rayman Legends has taken the crown for the greatest platformer ever made.

Sound like hyperbole? It's not. Rayman has always had a fun, quirky art-style and solid gameplay, but it was 2011's Rayman Origins that opened everyone's eyes to how good the series could be. It was gameplay bliss that took the best parts of Mario, Sonic, and its own predecessors to craft an experience that is just pure fun. It has inch-perfect jumps, and channels Sonic with its momentum-building sequences that outdo anything the hedgehog could even dream of achieving.

Legends came a couple of years later and just tightened up the formula a bit more, as well as tossing in fantastic music-centric levels and more co-op. It's a tremendous game and the fact that it contains Rayman Origins within it only boosts the value further.

Rayman Legends is as good a platformer as there has ever been. It's the culmination of 30 years of building upon a genre with a gorgeous 2.5 art-style, funny characters, quirky soundtrack, and adrenaline-fueled levels.

Legends is the platforming benchmark.