Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle (for Nintendo Switch)

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle (for Nintendo Switch)

Editor Rating: Excellent (4.0)


Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle (for Nintendo Switch) - Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle (for Nintendo Switch)
  • Pros

    Deceptively deep, complex gameplay. Tons of maps and challenges. Well-executed, fun premise.
  • Cons

    Squad sizes are limited. No online or competitive multiplayer modes.
  • Bottom Line

    Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle combines one of the most beloved names in video games with a horde of manic, cartoon rabbits for a surprisingly satisfying turn-based strategy experience.

Before Minions, there were Rabbids, Ubisoft's manic, sublingual, noseless horde spawned from Rayman: Raving Rabbids. Then the weird, bug-eyed, rabbit-like creatures caused havoc in their own game series. Now, they're running around Mario's stomping grounds in Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle for the Nintendo Switch. This $59.99 strategy RPG combines two cartoonish worlds with satisfyingly deep, XCOM-like gameplay for a very fun and strange experience. It's a combination of styles that work much, much better than you'd expect.

Thanks to a washing machine the Rabbids turned into a time machine (from 2011's Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time), the easily distracted and nonsensical army of Rabbids finds itself in the Mushroom Kingdom along with a strange device that can combine two objects into one. The device goes berserk, merging Rabbids and various household items in the Mushroom Kingdom, causing chaos. Mario, Luigi, and Peach join with a handful of Rabbids, oddly dressed like them, to chase down the combining device with the help of BEEP-0, a robotic proxy that serves as the in-game cursor.

Don't expect anything to be taken seriously in Kingdom Battle. Rabbids invaded the Mushroom Kingdom in a washing machine. It's fundamentally goofy. It never becomes saccharine or attempts to replace humor with sheer randomness. There's a method to the Rabbids' manic madness, and against the backdrop of Mario games, it's a well-crafted crossover. There are a lot of puns, however.

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

Pick Three

Your team consists of three characters that you pick from a pool that grows to eight choices: Mario, Luigi, Peach, Yoshi, and Rabbid versions of each. You must have at least one Rabbid character on your team, and Mario is always the leader. That means you can't have Luigi and Peach fighting side by side, but Rabbid Luigi and Peach work well together. It's a frustrating limitation that seems to be in place purely for the Rabbids branding, so you can't simply have an all-Nintendo team fighting off Rabbids.

Just running and jumping isn't enough to beat the corrupted Rabbids swarming the Mushroom Kingdom, so a mysterious benefactor sends weapons through BEEP-0 to help the Mario crew out. That means Mario gets an arm cannon and a hammer, Luigi gets a sniper rifle and an exploding remote-control car, and Peach gets a shotgun and rubber duck hand grenades. Each playable character has a primary and secondary weapon along with two active skills they can trigger to buff or heal teammates, set up different shields, and set up shots.

Strategy Steps

Most of the action takes place in turn-based battles arranged throughout four unique areas of the Mushroom Kingdom. It's very mechanically similar to XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, with grid-based movement, varying levels of cover, and a heavy emphasis on staying out of the enemy's line of sight. In fact, the cover system is effectively just a streamlined, simpler version of the system used by the XCOM games: Mario-size blocks provide full cover and absorb all shots unless an attack has splash damage, while half-Mario-size blocks provide half cover and make half of all shots taken against anyone in that position miss.

Unlike in XCOM, accuracy and character skill play no part in how the action plays out in Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. Attacks on targets in the open always hit, attacks on targets under full cover always miss, and attacks on targets under half cover are a coin flip. Most cover can be destroyed with different attacks, though some blocks are indestructible.

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

Every turn consists of three phases for each character you control: Move, Attack, and Skill. Movement is seemingly very direct and XCOM-like, drawing a glowing line to indicate your path within a range outlined by a glowing border. Once you scratch the surface, however, it adds an impressive amount of tactical depth, thanks to the different cooperative and offensive options available when you're in motion.

Every character can dash into enemies to damage them while they're moving into a new position, or jump off allies to spring into higher or farther locations than they could otherwise reach in one turn. Different characters can get different bonuses based on these actions. Mario can jump off allies and land on enemies for a powerful stomp attack, while Luigi can springboard off two allies in a row for extreme distance. Meanwhile, Rabbid Mario's dash attack causes an explosion, while Rabbid Luigi's dashes drain health from enemies to heal him.

Attacking is straightforward: Primary weapons, such as Mario's blaster and Luigi's sniper rifle, can be used any turn, while secondary weapons like Mario's hammer and Luigi's exploding drone require at least a turn to recharge after use. You can only use one attack per turn, so you can't hammer an enemy and then blast them (but you can dash into them before or after either choice, depending on when and if you choose to move).

Skills add even more options to the mix, and like weapon attacks, you can use one skill per turn. These include Luigi's Steely Gaze, which is a straight-up copy of XCOM's Overwatch ability: When enemies move within Luigi's field of vision, he automatically fires at them outside of his turn. Rabbit Peach, on the other hand, can heal allies around her, while Rabbid Yoshi can send nearby enemies running away with a shout. The buffs, debuffs, and positioning options these skills provide add even more depth to the gameplay.

These myriad options make Kingdom Battle's turn-based strategy remarkably complex and satisfying, without delving into granular numbers and wide ranges of probability like many other games in the genre. The calculations are fairly simple and don't rely on loads of RPG stats, but the sheer variety of what you can do each turn to get around the battlefield and attack makes the action feel deep and flexible without those numbers. This complexity also makes up for the small team size; since each character can do so much in each turn and directly work with each other to move around the map, four characters could have felt too powerful without making maps much more tediously dense with enemies.

Skills and Weapons

This doesn't mean Kingdom Battle is completely devoid of RPG elements. Your characters don't level up through experience grinding, but they do have extensive skill trees and a variety of weapons to choose from. Each character's skill tree unlocks and enhances different active and passive skills and grants bonuses to attributes like health and movement range. Starting out, Rabbid Peach's healing ability restores a fraction of health points for herself and allies within a few squares. Maxing out that part of the tree turns that skill into a massive swath of healing that restores half of each character's health.

You fill the skill trees by collecting skill orbs while fighting through the game. Each chapter provides a handful of skill orbs, and you can earn more by finding chests scattered throughout each world (often hidden behind simple puzzles) and completing additional combat challenges. Don't worry about distributing them between each character; everyone can use the total number of skill orbs you've accumulated for their skill trees.

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

Weapons add even more variety to the fights. As you fight through the game and solve different puzzles, you unlock new weapons for each character. Weapons found later in the game do more damage than the weapons you start with, but that's only part of the benefit. Different weapons can apply different special effects to your attacks. One of Mario's blasters has the potential to bounce enemies away (and cause additional damage if they fly off the map), while another blaster with identical damage numbers can gunk up enemies with honey to prevent them from moving at all. Each character typically can choose between two special effects based on their weapons, and keeping those effects in mind (along with any skills or enhancements that can make them more effective) can make battles much easier.

You use coins, which you earn by defeating enemies, to buy new weapons. Each chapter rewards a small pile of coins, and performing well by finishing fights quickly and not letting your characters get knocked out can make those piles much bigger.

Kingdom Battle takes place across four worlds. Each world has nine chapters, each of which contains between one and three separate battles. Each battle can get fairly complex and very challenging, especially in the second half of the game, taking generally 15 to 40 minutes for each fight. That's already many hours of playtime, but you don't have to stop there.

Much More Challenge

After beating each world, you can then play through a tenth, secret chapter for more skill orbs and gold, and to unlock a set of special weapons. You can also try 10 different challenges in each world that remix familiar maps with additional requirements and limitations. These challenges can get extremely difficult, demanding massive leaps in both skill and skill/weapon power compared with your first run through each world.

The landscape is also littered with puzzles to solve outside of battle. They can require pushing blocks, sliding boxes, flipping switches, and running around invisible walls and platforms to get to your destination.

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

Some puzzles are required to continue, but most lead to chests with new weapons, more skill orbs, or bonus content like 3D models and game art you can view at Peach's castle. The puzzles range from simple to satisfyingly challenging without feeling impossible, but they can hurt the pace of the game when you want to get to the next fight but have to push around blocks first.

Beating each world also unlocks a new overworld ability for BEEP-0, like moving blocks or picking up statues to place on switches. These abilities encourage you to run through the world you just beat to solve even more puzzles and access the secret chapter.

You won't find any online multiplayer options or any competitive modes at all in the game. However, you can play with a friend on the same screen in a cooperative campaign that has its own challenges. In this mode, each player can pick a team of two characters for a total of four allies on the map, and there are no limitations or requirements, such as keeping Mario on either team or needing at least one Rabbid character.

A Mix That Works

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle sounds like a really silly idea, and it is. Rabbids are silly, and Mario is hard to take seriously, too. But instead of just making a gimmick game with Mario-style platforming or Rabbids-style minigames, Ubisoft crafted a genuinely deep, challenging strategy RPG filled with dozens of hours of tactical wackiness. Without the Mario or Rabbids names, this would still be an excellent turn-based strategy game. With Mario and Rabbids together, it's an incredibly fun twist on some familiar and beloved faces and settings