The year 2017 is remembered as one of the greatest of all time in video games, and much of that revolves around the Switch. We got some legendary releases in its first year: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, Xenoblade Chronicles 2….and the fan-favorite Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle – a joint release from Ubisoft and Nintendo featuring Mario characters paired with everyone’s favorite troublemakers, the Rabbids.
It was directed by Davide Soliani from Ubisoft, who is a big Super Mario fan, not to mention Shigeru Miyamoto, Mario’s creator. He famously teared up during the official reveal of Mario + Rabbids at E3 when Miyamoto himself took the stage and gave the game his public blessing. So that being said, we wanted to love this game, and for good reason. It sounded like a passion project directed by someone who truly loves the world of Super Mario, but doesn’t work at Nintendo. Mario + Rabbids went on to sell 10 million copies and got a sequel, so let’s take a look to see if the game lives up to the hype.
There’s a certain level of trust that’s required for someone outside Nintendo to get to work on one of Nintendo’s IPs. Nintendo doesn’t let just anyone do that. Also, the tactics genre is not one Ubisoft has a lot of experience in. In fact, the only other tactics title I could find from them was Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars on 3DS from 2011. However, Nintendo has a ton of experience with the tactics genre going back to Famicom Wars in the late 1980s, which later became the Advance Wars series. Not to mention the Fire Emblem games, which they’ve been releasing at a steady clip since the early 1990s.
Mario + Rabbids might not have the insane depth and replayability of a series like Fire Emblem, but it’s a solid starting point if you’re new to turn-based strategy. It’s not difficult and it’s not especially deep, but its basic mechanics are strong.
You can play as Mario and Rabbid Mario, Luigi and Rabbid Luigi, Peach and Rabbid Peach, plus another character I won’t give away that’s unlockable at the end of the story. Each battle requires you to pick three characters to take into battle, and one of them must be Mario and one must be a Rabbid character. So if you’re wanting to just ignore the Rabbids and play with all Mushroom Kingdom characters…well, Ubisoft thought of that and made sure their characters don’t get ignored.
If you’re new to the Rabbids, you might wonder why players would want to ignore them. I’ll get to that in a bit.
The gameplay could be described as XCOM Lite. It’s grid based, but everyone has a lot of freedom to move about from turn to turn. There are pipes in every battle that make it easy to get around, and characters can toss each other to attain high ground. Everyone has a main attack with a gun weapon plus a secondary attack of some kind. For example, Mario can use his gun, but also has a hammer. Peach’s secondary is a grenade and Luigi’s is a motorized explosive that targets enemies and follows them. The secondary weapons have a cool-down so you can’t use them every turn. Every character also has some sort of special ability like shields, healing, or sight ability that lets Mario, Luigi, and Peach attack during the enemy’s turn if they come within range.
If this was a standard Mario game with turn-based strategy gameplay sans Rabbids, the gun gameplay wouldn’t work, but as a Rabbids crossover, it gets by. The guns don’t completely fit in the Mushroom Kingdom, but don’t feel out of place either. They work as a concession to all the havoc the Rabbids are causing, but it’s not an element I would want to see replicated in future mainline Mario platformers or Mario RPGs. The cover-based strategy gameplay is fun enough and different enough from every other strategy RPG on the Switch not named XCOM.
There’s also a skill tree for each character you can upgrade with Power Orbs that are collected during the adventure. Many of the skills in the tree are the same for each character, but unique special abilities are upgradeable as well. Coins are also constantly being collected which you can spend on more powerful primary weapons and secondary weapons.
Between battles, there are push-block or statue puzzles to mix things up. Again, pretty basic, but enough to break up the gameplay somewhat.
Surprisingly, there are only four worlds to explore. Each world has bonus challenges to take on for extra coins, plus you can replay any of the battles in the four worlds for a better ranking. You can get around 30-40 hours of gameplay, depending on how good at strategy games you are, and if you do all the bonus challenges and go for the highest ranking on each level. Just don’t go into it expecting the same amount of content you get in something like Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It’s nowhere close to that.
In fact, that Kingdom Battle wasn’t made by Nintendo somewhat shows. Not only are there guns, a first for a Super Mario game, but there are even a few instances of censored strong language, which was even more surprising. This is the first time I’ve encountered the word ‘hell’ in a Mario game. Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle should more accurately be called Rabbids + Mario: Kingdom Battle because the charm you typically find in a Mario game is minimized. In its place, you have the antics of the Rabbids. It’s constantly being highlighted and shoved at you.
As has always been the case with the Rabbids, their humor tends to wear thin quickly. They’re funny for about five minutes and then they’re not. They’re rowdy and rambunctious, they run around and yell and do crazy antics, they all look the same, they’re all a bit on the ugly side, and they all have the same silly, mischievous sense of humor. The only reason you can tell them apart is because they dress up like Mario, Luigi, and Peach. I wouldn’t have minded at all if instead of squaring off against Rabbid opponents, it was just the standard Goombas, Koopa Troopas, and Shy Guys we see in every Super Mario game. The Rabbids aren’t funny enough as jokesters or interesting enough as characters to carry a game like this for longer than a few hours.
Ubisoft seems to be aware that the Rabbids aren’t exactly popular. That seems to be part of the joke and I’m sure the ten people at Ubisoft who love the Rabbids find it uproariously funny that the rest of us have to endure them throughout the course of this game.
The best thing I can say about Mario + Rabbids overall is that it’s…fine. There’s nothing wrong with it mechanically and it does what it sets out to do. However, it seems geared for an audience that doesn’t normally play tactics games. There are better Super Mario games on the Switch and better strategy games as well. If you were to strip away the Mushroom Kingdom and Rabbids presentation, Kingdom Battle wouldn’t have much to offer from other games in the genre available on the system. The presentation does a lot of heavy lifting. That being said, it could be worth playing for just that reason if you’re interested in the tactics genre, since we’ve never seen a Mario strategy game before.
I can’t end the review without saying something about the soundtrack, which might be the game’s single greatest asset. Grant Kirkhope turns in a stellar orchestral score with the familiar strains we’ve been treated to from him since the Banjo-Kazooie days of the late ‘90s. His signature style fits well in the Mushroom Kingdom and it was great to hear. There’s a certain opera piece that had me laughing out loud and brought back memories of Conker’s Bad Fur Day, a Rare classic where Kirkhope used to work and made a name for himself. Fantastic effort.
VERDICT
When you’re talking about turn-based strategy, Mario + Rabbids has some robust competition on the Switch: Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Fire Emblem Engage, Advance Wars 1+2: Reboot Camp, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, Metal Slug Tactics, Triangle Strategy, Tactics Ogre, Disgaea…the list goes on.
If you’re brand new to the tactics genre and are looking for something fun and lighthearted that’s easy in the challenge department, Mario + Rabbids is for you. For everyone else, look elsewhere unless you’re a die-hard Rabbids fan. In truth, I would’ve bounced off Kingdom Battle halfway through if I hadn’t committed myself to reviewing it. It was just good enough for me to push through, but off the top of my head, I could list five better Super Mario games, and five better tactics games than Kingdom Battle on Switch. That doesn’t make it bad, but it should make you think twice whether it’s worthy of your time and money given what else is available on the console.
Yes, it takes place in the Mushroom Kingdom and Grant Kirkhope’s soundtrack is fantastic and helps drag the game along, but those aspects do much more heavy lifting than they should to compensate for the somewhat simplistic tactics gameplay and the Rabbid antics, which get old by the end of the first world. However, comedy is subjective, so your mileage may vary.
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