Review: 'Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle' a fun mash-up

Earlier this summer, when I saw the E3 trailer for “Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle,” a mash-up strategy game that brings together the capering bunnies that hopped out of Ubisoft's Rayman games with the comparably more staid heroes from Nintendo's Super Mario series, I was less than enthused. Although I played a couple of the Rayman games with my cousin, I never followed the rabbids across any of their spin offs. And over the years, I've grown leery of licensed games developed from Nintendo's properties. Because I don't normally go in for turn-based-strategy games, I assumed that there would be little to hold my interest. Well, you can chalk that up to a lack of intuition on my part because after spending a few days with “Mario + Rabbids,” I can say it makes for quite the diversion.

The setup for the crossover is as outlandish as you'd fear. At the beginning of the game, we find ourselves in the bedroom of a young inventor who has created a headset called the SupaMerge that can fuse together items. After an experiment yields less-than-magnificent results, she leaves her room for a break. That's when a time-traveling washing machine materializes and a gaggle of rabbids spill out. One of the rabbids puts on the headset and begins using it to zap things around the room. A room decorated in Mario & Co. memorabilia. One struck rabbid takes on the appearance of Princess Peach. Eventually, the rabbids get sucked back into the time machine along with a Mario poster and end up in the Mushroom Kingdom. Their arrival creates a tear in the space-time continuum, which pretty much ruins the unveiling ceremony for a statue outside of Princess Peach's castle. Of course, it falls to Mario and his compadres to tidy things up, so he and his companions go after the rabbid with the SupaMerge headset.

When Mario and his companions, RabbidPeach and RabbidLuigi, encounter hostile rabbids, they battle each other in a tactical exchange of tit-for-tat moves. Battle areas are divided into square grids over which each character can move a certain number of squares per turn. That number, however, can be increased by performing a team jump where one character jumps off the body of his or her teammate. This gives “Mario + Rabbids” a slapstick element that's amplified by other mechanics.

Under usual circumstances, enemies will wait to respond when it's their turn, but sometimes they can get around that. Factoring in enemies' special abilities and figuring out how to outmaneuver them in the fewest number of turns is the goal. But the game can make it feel like it's just creating excuses to inflict and suffer pratfalls, like watching a character scamper around with his backside on fire.

There are skill trees that unlock character-specific moves, increasing a team's offensive and defensive capabilities. (Unlock Luigi's iconic death stare for instance, which in “Mario + Rabbids” is more tepidly referred to as his “steely scare, “and he'll shoot an enemy that wanders into his line of sight.) In practice, characters can do things like slide tackle an opponent, then run away and jump on a teammate to an advantageous place (preferably with cover; the game favors offense attacks waged from above an adversary). Characters can also shoot at each other. The game sometimes complicates this. Shooting an enemy is not always worth the trouble — i.e. one class of enemies picks up an immediate extra turn when shot. Variable such as these keep things interesting.

Though Mario has wielded everything from golf clubs to a multipurpose robotic cleaning kit it may seem a little odd that the developers decided to give him a gun, or a selection of silly guns, that are distinguished for things such as their honey damage which, naturally, slows down enemies. Guns are the most cliched tool in video games and the Italian plumber has never needed one to be cool. It's obvious, however, that Ubisoft's developers approached their licensed material carefully because firearms feel like little more than surrogates for red and green turtle shells. That's to say they don't undercut the game's physical levity or make it dour in any way.

In between battles, players encounter numerous puzzles ranging from collecting a number of coins in a short time limit to getting a block to land on a certain switch. These activities nicely offset the regular distribution of battles.

Strategy games offer the joy of juggling different variables in your head. “Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle” has lots of charmingly frivolous things to think about and it's easy to collapse into its world of tactical antics because its gameplay is so absorbing. In the most complimentary sense, it feels like something Nintendo might have done if its humor was a bit more rough.

---

Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer who has been playing video games since the days of the Atari 2600. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the Barnes & Noble Review, Al Jazeera America, the Guardian and elsewhere.