When Ubisoft announced that it was teaming its bizarre bug-eyed, gap-toothed rabbis characters with Nintendo’s (NTDOY) iconic mascot Mario for a turn-based strategy game, I was less than hopeful. In fact, when the news broke that the companies were working together at E3 2017 and showed a demo of their game, I figured it was going to be awful.
A few months later, I’m eating my words. Not only is Ubisoft’s (UBSFF) “Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle” an impressive game, it’s got the makings of a must-have for Nintendo Switch owners.
Sure, the game isn’t quite on a level with Nintendo’s best Mario titles, but “Kingdom Battle” is the kind of game that catches you off-guard and pulls you in with its intelligent combat and genuine love for the Mario universe.
The messed up Mushroom Kingdom
The story behind “Kingdom Battle” is almost secondary to the actual gameplay, but it’s there. The rabbids, which come from Ubisoft’s “Rayman” series, have been transported to Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom and have turned the place upside down — thanks to a specialized helmet called a “SupaMerge” that merges objects and rabbids to create new monstrosities.
Your job is to defeat the rabbids running amok in the kingdom, recover the SupaMerge and return Mario’s home world to its former glory, presumably so Bowser can attack it … again.
The rabbids won’t go down easy, though. See, there’s not inherently evil, they’re just, well … dumb. And after being crossed with everything from paintbrushes to sunflowers, the rabbids have been corrupted into creatures that attack you on site.
Ubisoft could have made Mario, Luigi and Princess Peach as crazy and untethered as the rabbids themselves, but instead they play it straight throughout the game, which plays up the rabbids’ insane behavior making for some genuinely funny encounters. It’s not exactly the kind of humor that makes you think — there’s literally a scene where a rabbid pulls a rubbery duck from its hindquarters — but it made me chuckle.
Battling in the fields
In case you haven’t picked up on it by now, “Kingdom Battle” isn’t your normal Mario game. And that carries over into the combat. Rather than jumping onto enemies’ heads and crushing them under your ample posterior, you fight rabbids via a turn-based battle system using a three-person team.
You start out with Mario and two rabbids who haven’t been impacted by the SupaMerge’s corruption: Rabbid Peach and Rabbid Luigi. Yes, they’re pretty much rabbids cosplaying as the gaming legends, but it works.
As you progress through the game you unlock new characters that you can add to your party, but you’ll always need to include Mario, because, well, he’s Mario.
You travel through the world of “Kingdom Battle” in a group of three with a rabbit-eared robot that looks like a Roomba leading the way. But this navigation is little more than a way to move between different battle areas. There are a number of simple puzzles to solve here, but you’re not going to be scratching your head trying to figure them out.
When you enter a battle you’ll have the chance to survey the field to see how you can best approach situation. Some battles require you to defeat all enemies, while others see you escort a character to a safe zone. A third kind of battle requires that you get at least one of your characters to a safe spot on the map.
Of course, there are also boss and mini-boss fights that have you have to contend with, which require completely separate tactics.
By Daniel Howley.
Full story at Yahoo News.
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