Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope (2022)

Kingdom Battle was such a bizarre, unexpected treat. One of the devs famously cried at the game's launch event, and I love that for him. It was a game you could see the singular vision of, and passion for, in so many elements of its charming, nimble construction.

Sparks of Hope is what happens when Ubisoft execs get involved. While the combat is largely improved, the game itself is a bloated mess full of repetitive fight maps, dull puzzles, frequent glacial load screens and too many paid DLC packs.

Worst, they've fundamentally misunderstood their own branded characters. I truly hate how passionate I am on this subject: the writer who chose to give the Rabbid characters dialogue should be fired out of a cannon. Sub-Whedon sass replaces all the effective physical comedy of the Rabbids. You hear entire pages of dialogue that should have been replaced with a single "bwah". And the less said about the robot characters, the better. Utterly insufferable. Any one who put pen to paper on this gets le slap.

Wait, isn't this a kids game? It wishes. It can't decide who it's for, which is surprising given the narrowcast effectiveness of its predecessor.

Anyway I'm playing The Last Spark Hunter DLC and it's fine? If everyone stopped talking this'd get another star easy.

So my first impressions of this game were that it had improved on the gameplay and I was going to enjoy the heck out of it. I consider every aspect of the fighting to be improved, but, despite that, I've found myself not really looking forward to playing it, and I think I've figured out why.

The first game was super linear. You just followed a rarely branching "hallway," solved some puzzles along the way, and did the fights as they came along. The focus was the fighting, and because it of the linear nature of it, there were just a fixed number of fights per chapter (somewhere around 8), with a midboss and boss in each chapter. And this meant that the fights all felt pretty unique and well planned, like they had gotten individual attention.

The open-endedness of this game with primary and side quests means there are a LOT more opportunities to fight, and since these fights are often optional and fetch-quest-y, they become very repetitive and uninteresting. It ends up feeling like a slog.

Don't get me wrong, I love open-endedness and it obviously has its place in some RPGs or games with big open worlds, but this game didn't need it. For me the sweet spot would be the linear-ness of the first game with a focus on fewer, higher-quality fights, and the QoL improvements to the fighting system that come with the second game. I'm sad to find this game a bit of a disappointment so far, especially with how much I enjoyed the first game and especially the DK Adventure DLC.

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is one of my favourite games. It took the xcom formula, distilled to its most pure form, gave it a dash of wacky and bam we got kingdom battle.

Coming to sparks of hope I was expecting more of the same with some tweaks. It was a dissapointment. The gameplay itself is good, maybe a bit too easy as there are way too many OP powers, however is not amazing to compensate for its other components.

The original was brimming with personality, charm and fun characters. The sequel on the other hand lacks any soul, enemies are forgettable, bosses are not interesting, a lot of the good battles get lost in a sea of filler content and random battles that you get into.

Something i really missed from the first one was the integration of the battle maps into the overworld, that was such a fantastic feature. there is nothing like that here, the battles get place in some sort of void you get teleported into that had no connection to the real world.

The padded content is way too much and I decided to skip it after the first two planets since 90% of it was very boring battles. The sparks themselves added a layer that it became tedious to manage, it is no longer an easy click of a button to decide who to bring to battle, you also need to take care of skills, and sparks and move stuff around, very tedious stuff.

the last planet was also a drag, instead of making interesting battles they made bosses damage sponges and just throw a gazllion enemies at you.

I wish they had focused on the main battles, remove the overworld battles that had no "goal", create clever puzzles (some of the puzzles on the overworld are really fun), and focus on creative boss designs.

Do i recommend? is hard to say, gameplay wise is good, but is nothing amazing, I think there maybe better options on the genre to play than this.

and if you haven't picked up the original, consider that one first before getting the sequel.

I played it with my daughter, who had watched me play the first game and played with me its DLC. We were initially surprised by the amount of changes and I dare say it wasn’t great. She doesn’t like this kind of surprise and I like XCOM, so… But then we got used to it and we started liking a lot. We also found a new way to approach the game, by actually taking turns with the controller during the battles (she played during the exploration phase though). And in the end, we loved it.

Overall, I always love sequels that dare change a lot so I cannot hate it for doing that. It’s full of new ideas and sure, not all of them are great, I probably didn’t love the fact that you have to reorganize before every battle to counter the different enemies affinities, but I do love the effort and the general result of it. Plus, there’s a lot of cool moments, I loved the new characters and, the most important thing of all, they almost completely eliminated the cube-moving puzzles. This didn’t make me love the exploration phases, I really don’t care about them, but at least it made them tolerable. We even liked a couple of puzzles. Considering that the exploration phases of Kingdom Battle made me want to die, I’d say it’s a step forward.

Sidenote: initially, my daughter was scared by the standard difficulty level but in the end we decided to stick with it for almost all of the game, perseverating and through the couple of battles that gave us problems. The “almost” is because when we got to the final battle we probably had had enough of the game (after more than 20 hours across 5 months, it's understandable) and after one single defeat we immediately switched to easy and gg.

Finished up the Rayman DLC, it's pretty solid! Kinda short, and being locked to using Rabbid Mario and Rabbid Peach the whole time is a drag, but Rayman's moveset is neat and the new clone Spark functionally giving you a fourth party member feels great. Loved that par times made a return in the battles, and adding some simple platforming into the overworld segments really livened up those bits, as well.

Also, coming back to Rabbids after dozens of hours of Baldur's Gate 3 really drives home how excellent the controls are in the former. Pretty much every gridless tactics game should be copying the basics of how Rabbids moves.

The Rayman DLC finally came out for this yesterday and I'm pretty excited for it! Rayman seems like he could bring interesting new moves to the already excellent combat, and I dig the TV station theme.

But I've gotta finish up Baldur's Gate first, so for now it'll have to join the queue along with Goodbye Volcano High and Shadow Gambit. Too many good games this year!

How many people see Ubisoft listed as a developer/publisher and instantly decide on a holdout price point, totally unrelated to the expected quality of the game?

I loved Kingdom Battle enough to pay full price for this sequel. But this is Ubisoft and I know better.

• October 2022 release: $60
• November 2022 (Holiday sales): $40
• July 2023 (Prime Day): $20

I mentally set the $20 limit the day the game was announced. I feel victorious already in the Ubi pricing game. Nine months for a 2/3 price drop on a AAA title is normal for Ubisoft.

I'm happily playing this game now, the wait was full with backlogs and other new releases from publishers with less predictable pricing strategies. No ragrets 😏

Gotta wonder, though, from a business revenue perspective, why this one publisher chooses such an unusual, counterintuitive, and now predictable pricing strategy. And if it works for them, why have no other big name publishers followed suit?

This sequel to Mario’s first foray into blasting baddies with guns can be summed up with one consideration - he now wields two guns! Akimbo style, like a Chow Yun Fat of the Mushroom Kingdom. More gun, more game!

Sparks of Hope brings more of the same from the first game with some very welcome quality of life updates. The turn based tactical combat make a strong return. The cinematics and animations in general were top notch.

Just wrapped the story of the main game just shy of 26 hours and that felt like a good amount that didn’t overstay its welcome.

I would easily recommend this to fans of the first game and newcomers alike. I personally found some of the worlds in the first game a bit more interesting stylistically but the ones present here feel more fleshed out with sight gags and Rabbids doing their best to incite chaos in the backgrounds.

Grab your Fisher Price looking blaster and give it… a shot!

Playing through the new DLC for this. It doesn't do much to change up the formula from the base campaign, and the new planet isn't quite so pretty as some of the other ones, but the core combat is still great and a couple new stage gimmicks and enemies add some much-needed variety. Notably the cannons that shoot you across the overworld have been incorporated into the levels themselves, and the movement options they afford are a really natural fit with the rest of the mechanics.

Also, I never used Mario in the campaign since the original game required you to use him for every single fight, but I've been trying him out here just to keep things fresh, and it turns out he's utterly godlike. His ability to trigger overwatch shots on his own turn, combined with his ability to earn extra overwatch shots every time he gets a kill, means he can easily attack like 5+ times a turn with a little planning, turning all foes beneath his gaze into dust. I am become Mario, bringer of death.

Behold! The most petty complaint about a game you'll hear all day!

Mario's shoes squeak almost everytime he stops moving in the overworld. It's really irritating!

tap tap tap scruff tap tap scruff...tap tap tap scruff

And that's when he's walking! Not that it's worth running. The speed increase barely registers! Who holds down X to run anyway!?

Thank you. That was all. puts down megaphone

Steam Curator

I think that sometimes Sparks of Hope is overshadowed by its floppy eared predecessor, but overall its a superb sequel that adds a lot to the game.

Revamped movement options, better exploration incentives, and superior world designs means that this is a consistently great game even if its never an excellent one.

Worth a play if you liked the first one.

Finished this, I thought it was pretty good! The procedural generation for the levels makes them all feel more samey than they ought, the character skill trees run out of interesting abilities like halfway through the game, and I really missed the set par times for each battle that the original had, but the core combat is solid and the extremely powerful movement options are a lot of fun to mess around with.

Some nice music, too, and Rabbid Rosalina is one of the most delightfully overpowered characters I've seen in any game lately.