Raving Rabbids Travel in Time follows the nonsensical adventures of the Rabbids, silly and lovable rabbit creatures that were originally introduced in the
Rayman Raving Rabbids game that came out at the Wii's launch. Rabbids speak their own crazy yelling language, they love to dress up, and they love to dance. In this game, they're set loose in a museum, and get ideas for places to visit in the past. They then use their washing machine (high efficiency front loader, of course) time machine to travel in the past and alter history. The famed Hollywood sign can get changed to a Bollywood sign, for one example.
The Rabbids games have always been about sickly humorous games like plunger shooting, underwear washing, and a sadistic choir-boy slapping game, to name a few. They've never really had to make sense, they were just so wrong, and so funny. But the variety and creativity seems to be missing from the games in this Raving Rabbids iteration. The games here all boil down to being either a shooter, a platformer, or a flying game. There are different thematic variations: you run around gathering boxes, you run around gathering paint, etc. But really, there are only these types of games available. Well, you also get fishing games, but these are only available if you have the MotionPlus accessory. It's a far cry from the first game in the series that had games that were as entertaining for the onlookers as they were for the players. I mean really, we've gone from fighting back waves of mad rabbits with a carrot juice hose to just breaking colored bricks?
One problem with this game is that non-gamers may have a hard time, well, finding games to play. While anyone who plays video games regularly will probably not have a problem navigating the museum and finding things to do, I fear that non-gamers will probably get confused at the "museum as a menu" concept. It's not a huge deal: run around with your Rabbid long enough and you'll find the games eventually. But there's lots of side rooms for options, outfits, side-game puzzles, and all other manner of distractions besides the mini-games that make up this game. And even if you know where to go, you have to travel, fly or somehow make your way to the paintings that hold the games. You can use the Up arrow to get a quick select screen for the different game categories, but you still just end up being dumped into that part of the museum, having to do the same sort of searching when you get there.
One thing this Rabbids game has going for it is the online play system. You can easily jump into an online game to compete with people at any time. I say this with hesitation though, because you could just as easily end up with 3 people who want to go in 3 different directions and end up not choosing a game to play for 10 minutes. Since you need a consensus to go anywhere or start playing a game, well this can get tiring when you can't talk to the people on the other side most of the time. There are more focused versions of online play like the Tournament mode, where you pick the games and the number of times you want to play, so it's not all complete chaos. There are also community features like leaderboards, adding a bit more replay value to the game.