Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope Review: Nothing To Prove

When Ubisoft and Nintendo announced they were partnering up to bring Mario and the Rabbids together, people thought they had lost their minds. These two franchises seemed such polar opposites that putting them together felt wrong to a lot of players. Most, however, changed their tune when Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle was released to acclaim, offering deep strategy and somehow melding these two seemingly incompatible properties together beautifully.

Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope releases five years later without the need to overcome a great deal of baked-in skepticism. We know that Mario and the Rabbids somehow fit together, this time, we can be excited about all the new ways the franchises can be brought together. Instead, the question is what this new entry brings to the table after such a long wait. I’m glad to say that Sparks of Hope refines the gameplay of the original game, creating an experience I found incredibly engaging from start to finish. Some technical issues hold it back, but anyone who enjoyed the original will want to check it out.

Save The Universe

This time around, our adventure starts with the Mario crew and their Rabbid doppelgangers hanging out in the Mushroom Kingdom, with their biggest issues seemingly being that Rabbid Mario has lost his pants. That changes when a series of strange creatures called sparks, who are a mix between Rabbids and Lumas, the star creatures who hang out with Rosalina, arrive, running from an all-powerful cosmic entity known as Cursa. Cursa is determined to steal their energy and spread darkness across the galaxy. The Mario crew set off to protect the sparks, find out where Rosalina is, and stop Cursa.

While I enjoyed the character interactions here, as well as three new playable characters like the Rabbid Edge, you’re not going to play Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope for the story. The worlds you visit and the bosses you face are wildly creative, but the narrative is never complex or deeply involving. It’s all about the gameplay, and that’s where things shine. With an eventual team of nine characters, you have a ton of options to build out the team you want and customize them to fit your needs.

Shaking Things Up

Fans of the first Mario + Rabbids will recognize many similarities, but there are certainly plenty of changes from the original as well. You no longer stumble across your battlefields in the open world, instead entering levels to fight foes. This actually works out for the best, as it gives the creative team a lot more freedom to build sprawling, exciting areas without feeling a need to integrate them into the overworld, which is far more focused on exploration and puzzle-solving.

I enjoyed exploring the overworld here a lot more than in the original game, with puzzle solving being given a larger focus and with some truly inventive puzzles late in the game. The increased focus on puzzles caused some iss. Multiple times I had a piece of the environment that I needed to manipulate simply refuse to move, or not even give me the prompt to move it. These required a complete restart of the game to fix, and of course, for me to realize that this wasn’t by design and that something was wrong. It’s easy to explore these areas, thinking you must be doing something wrong for a bit before concluding that you can’t be.

There were some dips in the game’s framerate as well at times, though this isn’t as significant as it would be in other games due to the turn-based combat, and I even had it completely crash on me once. Thankfully, once I was ready to restart, this never lost me a significant amount of time as Sparks of Hope auto-saves constantly. I also had to restart a battle once because a character fainted on a necessary jump pad, and my party didn’t have a way to revive them. While none of these issues are game-breaking or a big deal on their own, this general lack of polish feels unusual for a game starring Mario.

Out Of The Grid

The various planets you’ll explore are very open, with lots of freedom on where you want to go. While some areas will be blocked until you complete specific things or earn specific powers, there are a lot of side quests available if you want to explore them, and you can jump back to older planets at any time.

Once you jump into battle, you’ll notice some significant changes as well. No longer are characters moving around on a grid. Instead, you have full control of your characters, with each having a movement range each turn. That means they can only move so far, but you can move them around, try different spots, see which locations give you the best options to attack from, and interact with your characters more deeply. Team movement options return, but this range of movement makes them a lot more useful.

For example, if one character is ahead of the pack, they can move back into the range of someone who can’t go as far forward, throw that character farther than they could otherwise go, then proceed to move as far forward as they could have in the first place. Movement options also relate to landing near them or dashing through them for extra damage. It took me some time to get a hang of all the ways the characters could interact beyond their two main actions per turn, and fully taking advantage of these options will provide a considerable advantage. With so much going on, I sometimes did wish turns moved along a little faster. The fast forward option helps a bit, but could have definitely been a bit faster, something I especially felt in some of the game’s larger late levels. This is a minor issue, though.

Finding The Right Strategy

With nine characters with distinct skills, you have a ton of options to customize your team. You’ll start with only two characters in battle, but this quickly grows to three, where it mostly remains, outside of some set battles where you’re given a fourth character to control. I wish this happened a bit more simply because I enjoyed so many different characters and wanted to consistently use more of them, but three gives you a nice amount of options to manage and lets you build a team that synergizes well.

Each character has a skill tree which you can freely experiment with, able to refund any abilities you want and pump them into different options as often as you like. This lets you put together specific builds for specific challenges, or to use alongside specific other characters. You can also equip two of the sparks, who each lends an additional power to your character, giving more freedom. Want to give a character leading the charge the option to avoid being targeted for several turns while they wreck the other team from right in their midst? You absolutely can.

Conclusion

With so many options to customize your team and strategic battles that feel better than ever, Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope is exactly what a sequel is supposed to be, building on the foundation the first game laid down while not being afraid to shake things up. A general lack of polish feels wrong in a game starring Mario, but beyond those issues lies a fantastic strategy title for all ages.

Final Verdict: 4/5

Available on: Switch (Reviewed); Publisher: Ubisoft; Developer: Ubisoft Milan, Ubisoft Paris; Players: 1; Released: October 20th, 2022; ESRB: E10+ for Everyone 10+; MSRP: $59.99

Full disclosure: This review is based on a copy of Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope provided by the publisher.