Developer: Ubisoft
Available on: Nintendo Switch
When Ubisoft first announced a Mario + Rabbids game, I groaned at the idea. Then when their first installment of it came out, I was shocked to learn that it was actually good. It had fun combat, fun visuals, and fun interpretations of the Mario characters.
Of course, it had its fair share of problems. The camera was very restricted and frustrating. The game had arbitrary restrictions on who you could have in your party. The dialogue was pretty cringe. Worst of all, you couldn’t explore much of each world without first beating the story (which is a shame, because it was fun to explore what little I was able to).
Still though, Kingdom Battle provided an excellent foundation that could be built upon in future installments. A great sequel was surely on its way.
Unfortunately, Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope is not it. Instead of building upon the foundation, it tries to be something very different, and it doesn’t fully succeed.
Sparks of Hope has a completely different vibe from its predecessor. Kingdom Battle was a fun, wacky, highly curated on-rails experience. Sparks of Hope is a JRPG.
In Kingdom Battle, the game explains that the rabbids are creatures that do nothing but induce chaos and wreak havoc wherever they go. It’s in their very nature. That simple premise formed the soul of the game. Its story, where they get their hands on a device that merges the Mario universe with theirs, justified making the entire world a playground of different objects and settings from the real world and the Mario world scrambled together. At every turn, Kingdom Battle was a fun, wacky experience.
With Sparks of Hope, Ubisoft heavily watered that soul down. The rabbids are now fully civilized. They can talk now, and they say things like “I was resigned to stay in my house forever.” The rabbid Mario characters, once over-the-top parodies, were given personalities of their own (even though their names and clothes are still copied from the Mario characters).
Sparks of Hope tries to be more serious, but it doesn’t fully commit to it. Every once in a while, you still see something like rabbids running around licking a giant popsicle stick, or an otherwise standard-looking spaceship deploying a rubber duck laser beam. The only difference is stuff like that seems out of place now.
The worlds the game builds are very generic and the story it tells is very shallow.
The visuals also took a hit. This might’ve been inevitable; that frustrating camera from the first game did allow the developers to focus all their efforts on the angles that are visible. Sparks of Hope has a much better camera, which is great, but it means the developers had to do more work to do to fill in all the space. Regardless though, the visuals in Sparks of Hope are more flat and uninteresting than Kingdom Battle’s.
The combat was redone entirely from scratch, though the experience is still basically the same. Instead of a grid system, the movement in combat is now fully analog. It’s a little more engaging, and doing things like team jumps now requires a little skill instead of just selecting squares on the grid. The downside is you don’t get to plan things out to the finest detail like you could in the first game.
There are new mechanics, like jump pads, or the ability to throw bob-bombs or switches that affect the environment. Some battles have new objectives, and some battles have very creative designs. In one such battle, you have to manipulate a bob-bomb’s movement using wind tunnels to destroy a gate. Sadly, these interesting battles are far and few. Most objectives boil down to defeating all enemies, and doing so is more mindless this time around.
There are no more arbitrary party restrictions, and there’s more customization this time around. Abilities, or sparks, can be mixed and matched with any character. Skill trees are designed to require more decision-making on what you want your characters’ strengths to be.
With this system though, once you find a setup that works, it pretty much always works. You can switch to a harder difficulty (as I did), but this only gives enemies more health and makes them deal more damage. New enemies introduced later in the game are just slight variations of existing enemies. Not much forces you to explore your arsenal and re-think your strategies.
In the overworld, there’s no longer a need to learn skills later in the game to fully explore. Unfortunately, the worlds are no longer that fun to explore. Each world contains the same set of cookie-cutter side quests. Completing them all means mindlessly going waypoint-to-waypoint. Navigating the map also proves to be difficult at times.
As a whole, Sparks of Hope is more tedious and uninteresting than its predecessor. It’s not a bad turn-based tactics game, but it isn’t a good Mario game. It’s an average Ubisoft game.