Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope: a much improved game – at a price

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle was a genuine delight when it launched some five years ago. This Switch-exclusive title combined X-COM style tactical gameplay with beautiful graphics and animation. It was made by Ubisoft, but had all of the polish you’d expect from a Nintendo first-party title – and arrived just a few months after the Switch debuted.

Now, finally, the sequel is here, promising a substantially expanded scope alongside a reworked, more flexible combat system. Tech-wise, we’re looking at another outing for Ubisoft’s Snowdrop game engine, the toolset best-known for powering The Division and its sequel. Gameplay is solid, but it comes at a cost: Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope lacks the same level of visual accomplishment as its predecessor.

It’s all about the gameplay enhancements with this one, which are substantial. Sparks of Hope radically reworks the first title’s combat. Gone are the movement grids, which have been replaced with a fully analogue traversal system. It’s less contemplative, and feels like a more natural fit for a console controller. Critically, you can move a character as much as you like within certain boundaries without using a turn, which makes lining up abilities less stressful. Other actions, like throwing bombs and executing team jumps, are now fully unmoored from turns as well and require a bit of real-time dexterity to pull off.

In general Sparks of Hope feels much more engaging than the first outing. And that doesn’t just come from the mechanical tweaks – the game actually requires some serious strategy at times. Kingdom Battle was painfully easy and most of the game’s systems could be ignored if you felt so inclined. But Sparks of Hope demands tactical play, even on its default difficulty setting, as enemies can punish you with massive damage if you make a mistake.

The player experience outside of combat is overhauled as well. Kingdom Battle structured its overworld like an old-school Mario title, with larger worlds broken up into individual combat levels on a linear path, with a fixed-angle camera system that typically showed an isometric gameplay view. In contrast, Sparks of Hope has large, RPG-style worlds with NPCs, quests, and a conventional right-stick third-person camera. Some of the novelty of the first game has been stripped away – the combat areas are now totally separate, for instance, and the game’s visual language bears less resemblance to classic Mario titles. But it seems like a worthwhile tradeoff for its flexible, Mario Odyssey-style structure.