Ubisoft wheeled out some of the industry’s biggest hitters to unveil Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle at this year’s E3 Show – Nintendo’s Mr Mario himself, Shigeru Miyamoto, along with the French publisher’s genial CEO, Yves Guillemot. And why not? You could see why Ubisoft would want to shout about a crossover game in which the worlds of its anarchic (but sometimes annoying) Ravin Rabbids and the moustachioed plumber merged. Miyamoto took pains to point out that he had one stipulation for the game’s development team: that it come out with something completely unlike any existing Mario game. It certainly succeeded in that aim, but what we weren’t expecting was that Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle would turn out to be quite so good.
Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is pretty easy to describe to a hardcore gamer: it’s XCOM, set in a version of the Mushroom Kingdom which has been invaded by those pesky Rabbids. Which means it’s a turn-based tactical combat game. If that doesn’t sound wildly exciting in this day and age, don’t be fooled: it proves to be as addictive as crack, and to provide plenty of laughs (often slyly undermining the decades of lore that underpin the Mario games) along the way.
Story-wise, it kicks off in the human world, where a Mario-obsessive geek has created a VR helmet called the SupaMerge, which can take two objects and combine them. A dimension-travelling washing machine full of Rabbids crashes the party, and ends up getting beamed to the Mushroom Kingdom, where havoc ensues. The home of Mario, Luigi, Peach et al ends up not only littered with giant versions of human objects (you often spy things like a Bullet Bill ensnared in a pair of underpants) but infested by armed Rabbids.
Meanwhile, Bowser Jr nabs the Rabbid with the SupaMerge – dubbing him Spawny in the process – and Mario and chums embark on a quest to catch him and restore the Mushroom Kingdom to equilibrium. That quest spans four worlds, each containing nine chapters plus one secret one (which you must revisit each finished world to find).
Mario has a three-strong team for battling the Rabbids (plus environmental hazards that pop up like Chain Chomps, Boos and the like). Initially, the other two members are Peach Rabbid and Luigi Rabbid: the former, in particular, generates some hilarious moments, such as when she meets the real Princess Peach. As you progress, you accumulate other team members, including Rabbid Mario and the real Luigi.
Each team member has specific skills: Rabbid Peach, for example, can heal nearby team members, while Luigi can move further than the others. And sometimes after a battle, your team members aren’t returned to full health, so swapping your team around is a crucial tactical consideration. Especially since new types of Rabbid enemies continually appear – such as healers and giant tanks which are pretty dumb and move slowly, but cause vast amounts of damage by hitting your team members with big slabs of ice.
Another absolutely essential game for the Switch: unbelievably addictive, frequently funny and very sophisticated.
Every world has a mid-boss and a final boss. The latter are as memorable as any we’ve seen in the Mario games, and tax your tactical acumen to the limit, while also making you laugh. Happily, as in XCOM, there’s a big skills-upgrade tree for each character, which lets you cash in the purple orbs you find in chests or earn in battles for a vast array of new abilities – Mario, for example, can acquire a hammer for melee damage in addition to his gun, along with a chance to shoot moving enemies even when he’s out of turn.
Thus, you can build your characters up into an incredibly complementary team, and the different battle-moves you can perform during each turn allow for incredible tactical possibilities (which somehow manages never to descend into overcomplication). Characters can launch sliding tackles on foes, then use other characters as springboards to reach high ground before taking cover and shooting exposed enemies.
All the way through, you’re given the chance to cash in the familiar Mario coins you amass on ever-improving weaponry, too, some of which has a chance of inflicting special effects, like Burn, which causes enemies (and party members, if they get in the line of fire) to run around in a panic, or Honey, which immobilises them for a turn. As you start launching elegant chains of events, all manner of deeply satisfying emergent behaviour – something of a Holy Grail for games developers – can be triggered, intentional or not.
You’re sometimes given objectives other than disposing of all the Rabbids you find, such as reaching a safe zone in an area where Rabbids constantly spawn, escorting characters to safe areas while ensuring they don’t take too much damage or eliminating a certain amount of enemies (often in a level where there is little or no cover). That does a pretty decent job of keeping proceedings from becoming too samey.
Ubisoft has clearly had fun with the premise of Mario’s world colliding with that of the Rabbids, and there are countless references that will delight Mario-geeks in Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. It’s also a pretty meaty game. But by far its best aspect is its gameplay, which really does feel every bit as rich and layered as that of XCOM. However, one area in which it outshines XCOM is its judiciously shallow initial learning curve: the whole of the first world is used to gradually introduce key concepts and skills one by one, in such a way that you can’t fail to master everything in your arsenal.
Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is yet another absolutely essential game for the Switch. It’s unbelievably addictive, frequently funny and, while it may look like it ought to be a piece of fluff, it has some very sophisticated – yet easy to master – gameplay going on. If you own a Switch, you’d be a fool not to buy it – simple as that.