Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle Review
A deeper look into Ubisoft and Nintendo’s weird mash-up
This game was reviewed using a purchased copy for Nintendo Switch.
What do you get when you mix a Rabbid and Princess Peach? “BWAAAH!” You’ve heard that one? Sorry, let me try again. What do you get when you mix a Rabbid and Luigi? “BWAAAH!” You’ve heard that one too? Huh.
Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is a weird game. It’s a Mario game that uses guns; it’s a cartoony, XCOM-inspired turn-based strategy game; it was released just two months prior to Super Mario Odyssey; and it wasn’t published by Nintendo. I’d say “I never thought I’d see the day,” but that would imply that I’ve thought about a game like this before. The Milan and Paris Ubisoft studios have created something entirely unpredictable, but the most surprising thing about the title aren’t the guns or the cross-over between the Mushroom Kingdom and the Rabbids. The most surprising thing is that it’s kind of good.
The premise of the game is that, while traveling through time and space in their Time Washing Machine, the Rabbids encounter an invention called the “SupaMerge.” The SupaMerge can combine any two items into one, but it has a glitch. If it overheats, it will start to wildly combine items in the environment without being able to stop. Of course, with the Rabbids being who they are, the SupaMerge is used irresponsibly and it overheats, causing it to combine a few Rabbids with figurines of Mario characters, another Rabbid to the SupaMerge itself, and a poster of the Mushroom Kingdom to the Time Washing Machine. A portal to the Mushroom Kingdom opens up and all the Rabbids are sucked through. The Rabbids who were combined with Mario character figurines and the Mario characters themselves team-up to find Spawny, the Rabbid who was fused with the SupaMerge, and defeat the Megabug, the personification of the SupaMerge’s overheating problem. Along the way, they’ll find a myriad of weapon upgrades, challenges full of corrupted Rabbids to fight, and environmental puzzles to solve.
In terms of gameplay, the entirety of Kingdom Battle can be cleanly split into two sections: exploration and combat. The exploration segments are charming, but bare-bones. The overworld is build linearly and without many branching paths. Occasionally, you’ll have to solve a sliding block puzzle or run through a maze in order to continue. More often than not, however, it’s a straight shot from level to level. Alongside the main road, there are scenes of Rabbids doing Rabbidy things like taking turns slapping each other in the face and scratching their butts on a tree. If examined, the game provides a sentence or two of commentary, usually something along the lines of “This is how they bathe? How uncivilized!” The quality of the writing isn’t anything to write home about, but these scenes are well animated and genuinely cute, which helps to distract from the monotonous box-pushing puzzles.
It’s no secret that games critics generally have a distaste for sliding block puzzles. There are a number of reasons why this is the case. Firstly, the player usually solves the puzzle mentally long before they can actually execute the actions needed to solve it thanks to the slow travel of the block they’re pushing. This artificially pads the apparent difficulty of the puzzle and wastes the player’s time. Secondly, they can’t really grow in difficulty without adding a few crazy mechanics that significantly alter how the player should think about the sliding block. Kingdom Battle elects not to do this and keeps the block puzzles at a level of challenge just above tedium for the entire game.
The combat, on the other hand, completely saves the experience. Like the games’ obvious inspiration, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, battles are turn-based encounters where units can maneuver around a grid, hide behind cover, take aim at enemies, and fire. It’s a deceptively simple system that takes little to no previous knowledge of the tactical RPG genre to understand. What does feel different than XCOM, however, is how souped up each character feels.
Every turn, each of the player’s three party members can take three options. To begin, they can move extremely far. Every character can usually move up to half-way across the map and even that can be extended by clever use of warp pipes or a skill called a “super jump,” which is where one unit bounces off an ally to gain a bit of distance. While characters are moving, they can even dash through enemies to add a bit of chip damage.
Before or after they move, they can attack. Every unit has two weapons. Usually, the first is a standard laser gun. Luigi, for example, has a sniper rifle while Rabbid Mario’s blaster is more shotgun-like, but they are mostly just regular guns and work how you would expect them to. Each character’s secondary weapon, on the other hand, add quite a bit more variety to the battle. Rabbid Peach has a sentry bomb that she can send out toward an enemy from a distance, Peach has a rubber duck grenade that does light damage and can be thrown over walls, and Mario has a giant hammer that does incredible amounts of damage, but can only be used at point blank.
Finally, every character can use one of their two special moves during their turn as well. Rabbid Mario’s “Magnet Dance” is my favorite. He can use it to attract nearby enemies closer to his position. This can be used in clever ways like drawing multiple enemies into his hammer’s range. Other characters’ abilities range from creating a defense-boosting shield to healing nearby allies. The key to a well-organized strategy often rests in the party members having compatible special abilities. Chaining these together is often where a lot of the fun the game has to offer comes from.
With all of these actions available to each playable unit every turn, the characters can feel a bit like super heroes, which is a pretty cool way to combine Mario’s athletic nature with the methodical strategy of XCOM. It feels great to to combine dash attacks, super jumps, cover shots, and melee attacks and it doesn’t take a whole lot of practice before the player gets starts learning the battle system’s idiosyncrasies.
If there’s one major gripe to be had with the combat, it’s with the lack of freedom in team composition. There are three units to a party, but the player doesn’t get the final say in which units get to be in the party. The team I usually wanted for any given challenge was Luigi, Peach, and Rabbid Mario. This, unfortunately, was impossible. Mario must always be in the party. There is no gameplay reason for this; he’s just considered the “Team Leader” and cannot be removed from the line-up. On top of that, the two other spots on the team cannot both be Mario characters, so Mario, Luigi, and Peach was impossible as well. The party must consist of both Mario characters and Rabbids for, again, no discernible gameplay reason. These limitations amount to the player only being able to choose about one and a half characters for their three character team. This is especially frustrating considering that it’s probably the result of some deal between Nintendo and Ubisoft’s brand managers.
In some other areas, like fluidity of animation and sound mixing, there is certainly room for improvement. Every song, while each an excellent Grant Kirkhope composition comprising his best full game soundtrack since Viva Piñata, is played at a drastically different volume and sometimes loops have abrupt endings that end up sounding quite jarring. Despite this, despite the limitations in party composition, despite the relative inanity of the exploration-based portion of the game, and even despite the lack of several key, seemingly obvious modes like a random battle scenario mode or a map editor, the strength of the battle system and the game’s pure charm shine brightly throughout the entire experience. The developers of the title had a brilliant, if narrow, vision and they’ve executed on it amazingly. Of course, if the other aspects of the game could measure up as well, it would be damn near perfect. As it stands, however, it’s a touching love letter to Nintendo from Ubisoft and it doesn’t really need anything else.
PS: A fair number of people have made it known that they do not find the Rabbids charming in the slightest and, to be honest, I didn’t like them in their past ventures either. Their presentation in this game, however, seems to be dialed back a bit in order to match the Mario universe more closely. That thing Rabbids do in pretty much every previous Rabbids game where they look blankly into the camera for a few seconds before yelling “BWAAAH!” doesn’t happen, for instance. I’m not saying that players fostering burning hate-balls of Rabbid intolerance will suddenly have their frozen hearts melted, but I am saying that the Rabbids’ Minions-esque humor is much more limited than normal and that such intolerance should stop anyone from playing what is essentially a solid Mario tactics game. There are certainly problems that I’d like to see fixed in DLC or a sequel, but the presence of the Rabbids isn’t one of them.
This article was written by Super Jump contributor, Mitchell F Wolfe. In addition to his writing, Mitchell is the host and producer of the official Super Jump Podcast. Please check out his work and follow him on Medium.
