Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

You'll often hear that this is better than it has any right to be, but let's remember one thing: the expectations we're walking into here are an XCOM clone starring Mario (?) and those butt-ugly Minion rabbits (??) created by Ubisoft(?!)'s Italian division (?!?!) whose only solo developed games were Xbox 360 motion games (...). The bar is pretty fuckin' low.

It's important to temper those expectations, because the polish on this game is awful. Aesthetically, you're getting more of a 2006 licensed game vibe than an actual original design like Mario & Luigi or Paper Mario. (Much as I respect Grant Kirkhope, his score doesn't help escape that feeling. Dude's still just making Banjo-Kazooie music, for better or for worse.) The graphics are weak even by the Switch's standards; awkward UI choices; music that cuts away the instant you hit pause. The camera is terrible, locking you into inconvenient angles in the overworld and obstructing your view during battles. The attempts at humour are mismatched to the Mario franchise at best and hollow antagonism at worst. (Beep-O, the outsider character you move around, is mean.) The areas in between levels are padded with generic block puzzles. And, of course, you're constantly looking at these ugly-ass Rabbids. Yeah, their actions and sounds can be kinda cute, but some of their designs are fuckin' disgusting. (Don't even get me started on the Valkyrie Rabbids that have machine gun tits.) The whole thing reeks of amateurism and low budgets where the Mario brand is being used as a marketing prop instead of creative leverage.

But I admit: the core battle gameplay - which, of course, is the only thing that matters for a game like this - is good. Quite good, in fact, deftly balancing the complicated and the simple for a game that can become surprisingly difficult and leaving room for a lot of varying strategies. The game is a slow build, introducing new units, actions, and enemies regularly but infrequently; you're given a lot of time to adjust to new mechanics and abilities, but there's eventually so many of them that the game reveals itself to be quite complex. They nailed the balance, making it accessible for those with minimal strategy RPG existence (and I imagine there were many players who'd only played Fire Emblem; certainly not a cover-based game like XCOM) while still leaving enough for fans of the genre. It can be enough at first understanding how your units move around cover, the best strategies for offense, things like that. If you know those things, you can breeze by the early levels to get to the hard stuff (which there is plenty of, including optional challenges). Otherwise, you can take your time to learn.

What most impressed me is how unconventionally the game links offense, defense, healing, and especially movement, where being strong in one area can often requires being strong in another. No unit fits neatly into one archetype. For example, Rabbid Luigi is a tank but also allows the team to heal by hitting an enemy with a melee status effect. Peach is a tank and a healer, but her healing comes from a movement option that requires jumping off a fellow teammate, requiring her to land near a teammate to heal them. At the same time, she has a shotgun and a grenade, which gives her very different ranged strategies for attacking enemies where she might need to be close to the enemies instead of her teammates. Luigi has incredible movement and good long range damage output, but he's fragile and doesn't do much close to enemies, so using that movement to go past enemy lines can be a useful risk, especially in levels where you need to reach the end instead of wiping out enemies.

Juggling these competing strengths and weaknesses at once isn't easy, but they all make sense together. Plus, the skill trees each character has lets you build them to be the character you want them to be, especially since you can reassign them before each battle. (Though you have to unassign all your skills at once instead of removing individual skills, which is a very annoying UI choice.) My only really complaint is that your teams are constrained in really arbitrary ways; you always have to have Mario on your team, and you always have to have a Rabbid on your team. I have no idea why this is the case other than laziness with dialogue and cutscenes, and it limits your creativity in how you approach levels. (Mario's a good, versatile unit, but his surprisingly restricted mobility made him a unit that limited how I wanted to play the game, which sucked.) Sucks that they make you wait until nearly the end of the story to get Yoshi, too, who's a good unit that can guarantee crits.

If the game were just the tactical RPG portions, this would be a genuinely great game. (For what it's worth, I never touched the co-op or multiplayer modes. It doesn't seem like the game changes much in those modes, but I could be wrong!) But the lack of polish and all the random crap in between levels means it's never able to hit the highs it's supposed to. Don't see a future where this gets a sequel, but the right team could really make this something special.