Sparks of Hope (SoH) is my first brush with the Mario + Rabbids crossover series between Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers and Ubisoft’s Rabbids franchises, but it’s actually the second title in this collaboration. SoH’s precursor, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, took place in the Nintendo’s Mushroom Kingdom, and SoH takes a page from Super Mario Odyssey’s book and takes place across multiple planets in a universe, traversed by spaceship as new locations are unlocked.
This universe is plagued by a malevolent creature called Cursa, who is all about absorbing energy and taking over the galaxy, in the process gooping up the place with a black slime called “Darkmess.” (A bit cheesy, maybe, but the whole game has a sort of 80’s or 90’s Saturday-morning cartoon vibe that I don’t mind.) Luckily, Mario and friends team up with the Rabbids to fight back.
Having no experience with the Rabbids or Mario + Rabbids franchises, I had no particular expectations for what kind of gameplay I would encounter upon booting up the game, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover it to be a turn-based tactical game, and one that’s both fun and satisfyingly challenging.
A good portion of the game is done in exploration mode, in which you run your characters around the setting, collecting coins, shopping for power ups, climbing ladders, talking to townsfolk, and the like. The graphics have a colorful and polished quality on par with the more recent Mario games I’ve played. They run smoothly on the Switch and are easy on the eyes in both handheld mode and on a bigger screen. As you advance, your robot guide, Beep-O, will gain some additional abilities, such as removing certain obstacles and scanning for invisible objects, that add additional interest to exploration. There are some simple puzzles to solve here and there, as well as hidden areas to find, coin-collecting challenges (as in the Mario games), and mini games scattered throughout.
While exploring, I had the occasional random surprise attack from a roaming creature, but this was mostly from me not always paying enough attention. As the tactical encounters can take a good chunk of time to complete, depending on the complexity, I appreciated that enemy encounters and quest battles are clearly marked with their difficulty level and also generally avoidable if you don’t feel like taking them on at a given time. In the case of roaming creatures, though, you may need to be at least somewhat alert while wandering in exploration mode and occasionally figure out ways to sneak past a creature if you don’t feel like fighting.
In another appreciated quality-of-life design choice, SoH has checkpoint flags similar to Super Mario Odyssey that allow you to instantly fast travel to key locations. Main quest events are generally only triggered if you manually trigger them, and they’re at static locations marked with these checkpoint flags, so you can get back quickly if you need to fast travel away to make last-minute preparations before tackling them. After triggering events, the game also allows you to preview the battlefield, make adjustments to your team, skills, and equipment, as well as to heal up your team if needed (in exchange for coins), right at the start of each encounter.
Encounters, when triggered, take you to a battleground location with a clear objective always posted at the top of the screen, such as to reach a certain area of the map, defeat all the enemies, survive a certain number of rounds, or to defeat a certain number of specific enemies. The way the battlegrounds are set up reminds me of playing laser tag or paintball, combined with turn-based structure of chess and tabletop D&D.
SoH does a good job of easing the player into the mechanics of the game, with Beep-O and reminder signs providing a fairly unobtrusive running tutorial as you naturally encounter new features in the course of gameplay, so the learning curve feels pretty natural. Although learning the interface for any new game can be somewhat confusing at first, everything is helpfully labeled on the screen with which button to press for which menu, so you’ve got reminders if you, like me, have played so many games over the years that you can’t keep all the interfaces straight.
Even on standard difficulty, I came across some situations where one slip-up near the beginning of the stage was the difference between failure and success. If things get too hairy or too easy, the difficulty level is adjustable, even at the beginning of each encounter, so you can adjust the game experience to your liking on the fly. If you fail, you have the choice to restart the encounter, restart from the last checkpoint in a multistage encounter, or to back out entirely and return to exploration—way better than being kicked all the way out to the opening screen if you wipe.
The maps are reasonably varied and interesting, with platforms at varying heights, many reachable only by performing a “team jump,” which requires one team member to boost another and therefore requiring some planning to traverse. Team jumping is also necessary to maximize your mobility, as a buddy can boost a character to a new movement zone outside of their original movement range. Maximizing your team’s effectiveness, in general, is very dependent on using your team members together, and I enjoyed this emphasis on team synergy. I also liked that while there are many viable team combinations for getting through a given encounter, each character brings their own unique strengths and abilities to the table and allows you to experiment with a variety of approaches.
The roster of heroes starts off with Mario favorites Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach, as well as their Rabbid counterparts Rabbid Mario, Rabbid Luigi, and Rabbid Peach. More playable characters join as you play through the story, and each has its merits. Mario, for instance, is an all-around balanced character who gets two pistol shots per weapon attack action and has a sentry technique that, when activated, allows him to preemptively shoot enemy targets that move within his area of sight. Rabbid Mario, despite having a similar outfit, is a pugilist whose attacks have a shorter range but affect a wider area and ignore cover, and his counterattack technique gives him the ability to counterattack within a certain range when an enemy attacks him. Princess Peach has a shotgun-like blast that can damage multiple enemies in one shot, and her special technique throws up a shield over herself and allies that negates damage for a few hits. Rabbid Peach has a one-target attack that can bypass cover, and she can heal allies within a radius. Luigi is a long-range sniper with good movement, who also has a sentry mode technique for shooting enemies moving within his line of sight. Rabbid Luigi has a Frisbee attack that bounces through multiple enemies and his technique lays down the debuffs. Additional characters Edge (a Rabbid with a big sword), Rabbid Rosalina (who can make enemies fall asleep and unable to act for some time) and Bowser join up as you go along, making a total of nine playable characters to mix and match.
While the weapons you can buy and collect are only cosmetic skins and not actual upgrades, it’s nice that you don’t need to spend the coins on them if you don’t want to, given that you may need to purchase healing once in a while and maybe upgrades, such as healing Super Mushrooms and other consumables that may give you an edge in battle. Instead, the heroes are themselves upgraded with individual skill trees, with points gained when leveling up. You can rearrange the skill trees as often as you like, even right at the start of an encounter after scanning the battlefield, at no cost (another quality-of-life choice I appreciate). Then, there are the eponymous Sparks—Luma and Rabbid hybrids that can be equipped on the hero characters to give them additional abilities, such as turning invisible to avoid getting targeted by enemies, launching an area-of-effect attack, or adding elemental effects to weapon attacks. The team collects Sparks throughout the game, and eventually, each character can equip multiple Sparks, providing even more loadout customization.
Overall, I definitely appreciate SoH’s emphasis on allowing players to easily and freely experiment without penalty and letting the encounters, rather than the monotony of the grind, challenge and entertain the player. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the way it should be.
Also, as the parent of a young child, I’m thankful when games are designed so they can be played with a kid sitting right next to you. The challenge level of the game isn’t watered down from what I’d expect from a turn-based tactics game, but as is expected of a game with Mario in it, other than some mild cartoonish violence, the game steers clear of potentially objectionable content, including strong language.
Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is available now, and as of the time of writing, retailing for $59.99 for the Standard edition and $89.99 for the Gold edition, which in addition to the Standard content, includes a season pass to upcoming DLC packs (including additional story content, new heroes, quests, and battles), and the Galactic Prestige Pack (a set of weapon skins with a galaxy theme, cosmetic only).
