I quite enjoyed the first Mario + Rabbids game. A tactical shooter game like X-COM but cuter. When I started this game I just felt “oh no, what have I done?”.
Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope is a tactical shooter, a spiritual continuation of the previous game Kingdom Battle. You follow a quest line, run into battles where you choose three of Mario’s friends and fight it out in an arena against evil enemies. There are five worlds to explore and a sixth ending which is more of a gauntlet. Move from world to world and kill the big baddie at the end. No fuss and no surprises.
The writing of the game is the real weak point. It is awful. I’d rather prefer there be no writing at all to be honest. The dialoge between Beep-0 and the space ship AI Jeanie, will go to history as the worst in all video games. Thankfully the dialogue cut scenes are skippable.
The tactical battle arenas are okay. They are moderately fun, but have some problems. It is both very hard to predict what the enemy will do in the next move, and at the same time very easy. It is hard, because if you’re clever enough you can pretty much move around the whole map. And yet it is easy, because if you bait the AI with a dummy that stands without cover, the AI will always go for the dummy.
The enemy progression is fine. You get tougher and tougher enemies through the game, but the new enemies are mostly rehashes of old ones with new abilities. Your heroes don’t gain new abilities though, but you can attach abilities to your heroes with sparks, and that way find new ways to kill enemies. It’s still quite boring. Just like the enemy progression is rehash of old enemies, the sparks are mostly the same attack with different elements, instead of fire attack it will be lighting. Not very inspiring.
I think that sums up the whole game. It’s not very inspiring. The dialogue is awful, the story is boring, the enemies and the bosses are boring, and even the main villain is completely uninteresting. You find some fun in the arena matches, but they also becomes repetitive quite fast.
I rate this game as OKAY.
Replay 