Rainbow Cotton
OpenCritic Rating
Top Critic Average
Critics Recommend
Critic Reviews for Rainbow Cotton
Rainbow Cotton is an interesting peak into the history of Dreamcast gaming, but it lacks the gameplay upgrades and presentation flourishes to make it a genuinely enjoyable game outside of that context.
Overall, Rainbow Cotton is a very faithful HD remaster of the original Dreamcast game. That means it suffers from the same functional shortcomings that game did. So unless you are a diehard fan of the Cotton series, you can give this one a miss.
Although there's room for improvement in ININ's presentation, and it would have been nice to get a few more bonus unlockables, this is still the best version of Rainbow Cotton around thanks to its silky smooth frame rate, lovely upscaling, widescreen formatting, and all-important gameplay enhancements. It's a fun, at times spectacular, novelty adventure in the Cotton universe, that can occasionally feel confusing and cluttered. Stick with it, though, and an enjoyable and genuinely charming rail shooter bubbles to the surface.
Rainbow Cotton is a fun arcade-style shooter, but it has a couple of flaws. While the game plays pretty well and I did enjoy my time with it, the lack of any information on even the basics of the game's mechanics as well as it sometimes being hard to see what Cotton's shooting at can make the game a bit more difficult than it should be, even on the easiest of difficulty settings. It's still an enjoyable game, but a few additions could have made it even better.
Rainbow Cotton has a colorful and cutesy theme that will appeal to some fans of anime. But outside of the HD visual upgrade, there are multiple problems with the gameplay that can become frustrating. Co-op and Retro mode are interesting inclusions, but the meager amount of extra features leave almost no reason to come back later.
Rainbow Cotton is a lot of fun. It's one of those games you can grab quickly and not have to drop hours on. The cutscenes between levels will make the kids giggle at the antics of Cotton and her friend as they journey to get candy.
Rainbow Cotton is the kind of game that series fans will happily add to their collection but it surely won't entice many folks outside of that player base with its dated gameplay that unfortunately hasn't held up all that well. 🌈
Maybe it was too difficult to incorporate, maybe it made the game too easy, I couldn’t tell you. What I can say is Rainbow Cotton is the magical girl wrapped version of a Cybertruck. Quirky and odd, the novelty wears off when you can’t control it and it ultimately crashes and burns, killing you with design flaws that the creators were well aware of.
