The reviews have arrived for the sequel to the excellent Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle from Ubisoft and reviews are generally very favourable with the average review score on Metacritic at 86 (as of time of writing). Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope changes the formula up from the first game with notable improvements such as more depth and exploration, dramatically improved visuals, the ability to switch up your party so that you don’t have to have Mario in your party all the time, leading to new customised play styles and extravagant skill trees, plus another wonderful musical score from Grant Kirkhope and co.
The issue that some of the reviewers have with Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is that could do with additional polish due to a few bugs surfacing and some slight performance issues. Hopefully those issues will be resolved with future software updates. Still, it sounds like another solid Mario + Rabbids game from the talented team at Ubisoft Milan. Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is available on Thursday, 20th October.
“Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope takes the excellent tactical combat ideas of Kingdom Battle and runs absolutely wild with them. Its goofy characters still have the ability to bounce off of each other, but they’re now free of the rigid grid and wonderfully customizable thanks to the mix-and-match Sparks that give them new and reliably interesting powers. Between fights you get to catch your breath in the large and brilliantly colorful open worlds, solving its light puzzles and being puzzled yourself by its oddball story. It’s extremely gratifying to play an ambitious sequel that fixes all of the main issues I had with the original, and then some.”
“Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope is not without some bugs here and there. None of them are especially game breaking, but one I ran into did cause me some confusion and missed opportunities in a battle. Most players will see that the game can have a lot of pop in and dropped frame rates when exploring the planets. Unfortunately, that can break the immersion when you are watching a cutscene as you are landing on a big new planet.”
“Overall, Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope is able to captivate with its worlds and pull you down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of side quests, treasures, and battles. You’ll find yourself wandering off course to help a Rabbid in need or rescue a Spark who will then help you on your journey.”
“There is a genuinely brilliant strategy game lurking under all this flimsy Nintendo wrapping. For younger audiences, these complaints probably won’t matter, but for the fully-grown Nintendo faithful, Sparks of Hope’s paper-thin narrative, juvenile jokes and disappointing hub worlds are hard to ignore, despite the fantastic fights.”
