Yori has reached faster-than sound effect attack speed! Oh, yeah, Genchu is on his way. Speculate away… or not. Good thing he has a series of sonic booms to point him in the right direction.
I really didn’t plan on buying Mario + Rabbids. The Rabbids franchise just never grabbed me and I had acres of Hyrule to search for Korok seeds. But Ubisoft found the right formula to tempt me away from Hero Mode – a 4-way crossover between Mario, Rabbids, Banjo-Kazooie (music by Grant Kirkhope), and Fire Emblem (okay, this one is a stretch, but to me all turn-based tactics games are Fire Emblem).
Ubisoft’s take on the Mario world is gorgeous. It’s really a shame that they don’t give you more camera control so you could look around.
The games few flaws are obvious pretty quickly: controlling Mario and the gang in the overworld is clumsy at best. This makes annoying block puzzles even worse. While you can warp to individual challenges later in the game, I found exploration tedious. This may be my own lack of direction sense speaking, but a map screen would be ideal, considering the backtracking you’ll do to find secrets.
The point of the game is the combat, and that’s nearly perfect. A few enemy animations are a overly long and the poor camera control spoils some of the fun, but that’s it. The strategy is deeper than I expected and relies largely on chaining your heroe’s various abilities to move quickly around the board.
The comedy is constant and very… Rabbid. I particularly enjoyed the more subtle character animations of your teammates, but by far my favorite part of the game has been the Mario opera (spoiler to follow).
Mario needs more opera.
Published on by Joseph Kovell
