Despite having Nintendo’s world-famous mascot and his moustache blasting away on its cover, and a sizable spread of highly favourable reviews behind it, it felt like 2017’s Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle never truly struck a chord with the mainstream Switch audience, those players who’d happily pick up a regular Mario-branded game without hesitation. Perhaps that’s the Rabbids factor, less-known as they are to consumers en masse; or perhaps its gameplay pitch of ‘XCOM but Mario’ didn’t resonate. But with two million copies shifted, Kingdom Battle is lower in the Switch’s list of best-selling software than several ports of Wii U games, including Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze, Pikmin 3 and Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker.
Watch the cinematic launch trailer for Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope below…
It deserved better, as anyone who did play it will tell you. But with this welcomed sequel, again developed by Ubisoft (Paris and Milan teams, specifically) with little publicly divulged input from Nintendo itself, this franchise crossover mixing real-time tactics with turn-based combat and rewarding exploration might find a seat at the top table of Switch must-plays.
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Sparks of Hope takes that elevator pitch of XCOM but Mario and evolves it into something that’s wonderfully its own, taking the action away from the Mushroom Kingdom and out into the stars. If its predecessor could seem a little stiff with its everyone-in-order combat scenarios, this experience is far freer of flow with plenty of experimentation potential depending on your line-up of characters and the titular powers-providing Sparks (a fusion of Rabbids and Lumas - I’m not about to get into the biology of that) they possess.
Whoever you line up with - and by the late game you’ll have nine options, ranging from the available-instantly Mario and Luigi to the later-unlocked and amusingly languid Rabbid Rosalina and the newly introduced Edge who plays up to their name in a very knowingly cringeworthy fashion - opens avenues to collaborative combos as one hero can dash and blast an opponent into the firing line of a teammate, to finish them off in a single, smoothly calculated turn. There’s plenty of options regarding movement and cover-placement of controllable characters, and once you find a rhythm with the right team for the right level, acknowledging enemy weaknesses by scanning the map with Beep-O (the hovering Roomba-looking thing - it talks, too), every encounter becomes a joy.
And that’s a good thing given how many times each environment breaks from its enchanting exploration mode to a confrontation with a raft of foes, either through pursuing main-quest showdowns or dash-sliding into wandering enemies to open side-quest challenges. Most of the game’s meaningful action is set in these arenas of half-height and full cover, warp pipes and drop-down markers and jump pads, every feature a plaything to exploit; and each major battleground feels as much a character as the participants scrambling around across it.
Over the course of Sparks of Hope you’ll visit five main locations in a Super Mario Odyssey style, travelling back and forth through space in a weirdly shoe-shaped ship, every one of them available to return to a few levels later (and you’ll need to, if you want to see everything these environments are keeping secret). These ‘planets’ - they’re not, really, but go with it - bustle and buzz with NPCs and enticing corners to peek around and pesky impasses to overcome with Beep-O’s sonic power-up. They, too, are a joy to play in.
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And that’s the main takeaway from Sparks of Hope. It’s not the story, as Saturday-morning-cartoon slight as it is (uh, some big bad shows up, you’ve got to save all these Sparks, IDK it all got fuzzy for me despite the excellently animated cutscenes), nor is it the crisp and bright visuals or the sumptuous soundtrack which I can quite happily leave running for a while (shout out to composers Yoko Shimomura, Gareth Coker and Grant Kirkhope - look up their credits, they’re legends - for crafting one of the most elegantly ebullient gaming OSTs of 2022). It’s the joy that stays with you after every session, that comes from a game so expertly designed to maximise pleasure over potential pain points.
That said, if you do want things rough, there are difficulty sliders for that. Likewise if you want it effortless you can go so far as to make Mario et al invincible in every encounter, making higher-level enemies fall at your feet. The middle ground will be perfectly comfy for most players though - challenging enough to make you plan two or three moves ahead and adjust your Spark and hero roster from battle to battle, but no breeze to move from level to level on your way to a showdown with Cursa… that’s the big bad’s name. She’s gunked all these planets up with something called ‘Darkmess’, you see, but look, it doesn’t matter. Apologies to the narrative team here but Sparks of Hope isn’t one you’ll remember for its plot. Mario and friends save some things from another thing - it is what it is.
And again, that’s fine, because what matters is that this is a game you can sink into and really feel a sense of enthralling fantasy escapism from the terrifying real world we’re in right now. Even in situations of jeopardy, in environs glooped in tar-like muck and patrolled by fire-tossing meanies, there’s a palpable positivity radiating from your Switch screen throughout (speaking of which, this is a treat to behold on OLED, and performs with no notable blips either handheld or docked). I could easily spend hours (and indeed, I did) in the icy climes of the game’s second stage, Pristine Peaks, with its sparkling snow and delectable audio accompaniment, all sun-catching twinkles in the crunchy crust and stardust in the frigid air. At the risk of repeating myself: it is a joy.
Curveballs that lock you into certain heroes for select battles ensure you never slip into the habit of sticking with the same line-up - and thankfully your entire party levels up simultaneously, so you never leave underpowered pals behind - and there’s great satisfaction in getting your Sparks right, combining their elemental-and-more powers (fire, ice, um, toxic sludge - hope someone comes along to clean that up) with each hero’s unique skill set. Diving into the depths that Sparks of Hope’s combat offers is a delight that I don’t want to ruin for anyone by going into explicit particulars, so just trust me that it feels like there’s infinite combinations to play around with - and should you get it wrong and lose an encounter, you always have the option to start it over immediately or come back later at a higher experience level. The side-quest stuff will always be waiting for you.
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The basics click quickly - you get a number of action points per character, and need to use them wisely else you be stranded in the open with a sniper’s rifle pointing at your noggin - and gel with every newly introduced ability in a way that never devalues what you started with. There’s a skill tree to put points into covering movement distance and damage dealt, and all that jazz, and each Spark can be levelled up too, but this becomes a natural part of progress between combat situations rather than a chore hidden away in forgettable menus. And on those, while some screens are a little fiddly - it feels too easy to accidentally assign the wrong Spark - everything is clearly written and executed with an emphasis on functionality over aesthetic form.
One niggle is the camera. Not in battle, when you can fly around from a drone-like perspective to keep tabs on opposition movements, and lay out your battleplans with some confidence. It’s the free-roaming areas where sometimes a big chunk of rock, a tree or a wall will lodge itself between your eyeballs and Mario’s backside (not so Chris-Pratt flat here). And while the right stick does what it’s so traditionally known for, swinging the camera this way and that, it feels like it doesn’t quite keep up. Which makes against-the-clock challenges to grab coins or toss fish into a pond (because, why not) more tricky than they should be. The game also does that thing where some lines are fully voiced and others aren’t, while Beep-O probably says too much (look, I just never took to the thing, sorry Ubisoft). I don’t mind the deliberate inconsistencies - it’s not like Mario games aren’t this way all of the time, with our plucky plumber offering only a few woo-hoos and yippees as those around him speak in coherent sentences - but it may frustrate others.
Not that the annoyances stick around at all, as it’s never too long before you’re digging into a fresh face-off or chasing penguins for a pirate crew or getting a rambling poet to make sense for one minute, just one, come on man, help us out here, these trees are dying. There’s so much to do in Sparks of Hope, and so little of it feels like for-the-sake-of-it padding. There’s almost always a worthy reward to everything, be that a pocketful of coins for spending on items - also useful in battle to add a second movement stage, bomb the stuffing out of an enemy, or reset the wait-some-turns cooldown on character abilities - or an actual Spark to take away and train up into a lethal killing machine. Off-piste pursuits feel right in the environments you find them in, and there’s a real freedom to how you build each hero through skill tree development and Spark deployment.
As a team-based and tactics-first game with no Goomba-splatting butt bouncing on show (although, stomping’s an option), and no 3D platforming to be ever so precise about, Sparks of Hope may still remain on the periphery of the radar for some Mario admirers. But for anyone who was on the fence about Kingdom Battle and ultimately didn’t pick it up, know this: you’ll be missing out on a really special Switch exclusive, a triumph of IP-twisting fun and frolics, if you let a little nonsensical genre bias get in the way.
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Pros: gameplay that challenges but allows for great experimentation, beautiful visuals and music, loads of extras that feel worthwhile
Cons: some fussy cameras movement, story leaves no notable impression (sorry!), the voice-over work is a love it or hate it sort of deal
For fans of: XCOM, Advance Wars, Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, Mario games in general
8/10: Excellent
Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope is released exclusively for Nintendo Switch (version tested, obviously) on October 20, 2022. Review code supplied by the publisher. Find a guide to GAMINGbible’s review scores here.
Featured Image Credit: Ubisoft, NintendoTopics: Nintendo Switch, Super Mario, Ubisoft