I move an injured Peach into tiara-high cover. On the one hand, it obscures her line of sight, turning at least two Rabbids with springs attached to their feet into unreachable targets. On the other, I now hold the high ground over a third enemy - and I only need one more kill to complete the mission. My gumption is rewarded - it’s a 100% hit chance. A celebratory animation kicks in once I hit the fire button, zooming into the steely face of the Mushroom Kingdom’s de facto leader as she levels a shotgun the size of a French horn at her target. An enormous boom, and a cone of flame engulfs the creature and he scurries away, his arse now on fire (Peach currently has a 50% chance of adding a burn status effect). He phases out of existence, and I win. The Princess gives a demure twirl of happiness at having slaughtered those who would invade her country.
Mario + Rabbids is really weird.
That seems to be the point. When Ubisoft’s collaborative project leaked in May, it was hard to imagine anything more than a ‘Mario & Sonic Spoil the Olympics for Everyone’-style cash-grab, and the internet responded as you might expect. But when Shigeru Miyamoto himself appeared on an E3 stage to reveal that it was, in fact, an XCOM-indebted squad tactics game, it saw one of gaming’s more dramatic turnarounds in public opinion in recent years. Mario, his mates, and some Rabbids playing dress-up, all using huge guns in turn-based battles is, indeed, really weird. Weird enough that you really want to see more.
Mario + Rabbids' local co-op mode ups the squad size to four and lets two players take on a series of increasingly difficult challenge battles. Watch a full battle using two Joy-Con below:
Having seen (and played) more - several hours of both single player and co-op modes - I’m happy to say that the concept is as successful as it is weird. On the whole, it’s totally fair to mark this as a somewhat streamlined XCOM. The bulk of the game sees you choosing a three-person squad (always Mario with two others), taking them into cordoned-off combat zones, then using a combination of movement, stat-heavy combat and special abilities to fight off an opposing force. Anyone with even a base knowledge of Firaxis’ alien-offing series will feel at home here, and the simplified style (there’s little out-of-combat management to deal with, and characters’ abilities and skill trees overlap frequently) should help draw in and educate those who aren’t.
“Simplified”, however, does not equate to “easy”. The delight of a Mario game is in how it takes a single button press - Jumpman’s jump - and turns the simplest possible action into an ever-changing art, eventually asking you to press that button perfectly, every time, to overcome any number of hazards. You can feel Ubisoft aiming to replicate that philosophy here, except “jumping” is replaced by “playing a virtual board game”.
Thrust into a late-game battle, I was dispatched embarrassingly easily by the AI when I didn’t pay due care and attention to setting up combos, movement distances or areas of effect. The interactions may be simple - move, shoot, ability - but how and when you use them is paramount. Playing with seven of the game’s eight characters, there doesn’t appear to be any ability to revive a downed squadmate - and even XCOM has that - meaning constant attention needs to be paid to health bars, and good team composition is a must.
M+R also comes with some pleasant changes to the XCOM formula. The game’s combat areas aren’t just disconnected maps, but part of distinct worlds (as far as we know, a lush garden, an ice-covered desert, a ghostly-themed area, and a volcano’s innards), each a single, seamless set of challenges.
That includes combat missions with different objectives (I’ve had to clean out whole enemy forces, or simply reach an end-zone), puzzle areas that require no combat, and boss battles that require bespoke tactics to beat. While I didn’t get to play through a full world, I was told the first would take 2-3 hours to complete, with each following world taking longer. Every combat area is also turned into a more difficult challenge objective once completed, extending how long you can spend pottering about each world before moving on.
The most apparent difference from XCOM, however, is in combat: appropriately for a game based on a platforming franchise, M+R puts a huge premium on movement, particularly as a team. Characters can technically only move once a turn, but by using both friends and enemies, that single move can be almost absurdly prolonged. Running into an enemy performs a Dash melee attack that offers an extra spurt of movement afterwards - some characters can Dash multiple times, meaning you could attack three enemies, run through a Warp Pipe (another extra burst), run up to a squadmate, Team Jump (an extra-long bonus move) into cover, then fire again at the enemies you already hit.
It quickly becomes an enticing extra challenge not just to destroy Rabbid hordes, but do it in the most efficient, stylish manner possible. Character special abilities are designed to intersect too. For instance, Luigi has the Steely Glare ability (wonderfully, an open reference to the famous ‘Luigi Death Stare’ in Mario Kart 8) which allows him to take extra sniper shots at any enemy moving past him. Rabbid Yoshi, meanwhile, has a move that scares enemies into moving during your turn, setting up Luigi to take extra shots, sometimes accompanied by an animation that seems closest to Sniper Elite in its delight at watching projectiles fly into bodies in slow motion. It’s great.
Animation is wonderful across the board. The game’s designers have already talked about Nintendo’s almost forensic attention to detail when it comes to its characters, and it shows. They move beautifully, each hero reacting differently to different situations, right down to how they take cover. Every one brims with character - the Rabbid versions of our heroes (and no, Ubisoft still won’t say how they got that way) most of all, emphasising and distorting the originals’ traits - Rabbid Mario’s got a toothpick-chewing swagger, Rabbid Luigi is clumsy, Rabbid Peach has pathological sass, and Rabbid Yoshi is… well, I don’t know how to describe Rabbid Yoshi politely. I never expected to enjoy any Rabbids’ company, but here we are.
The Snowdrop engine (originally built for The Division, no less) is a good fit for all of this, seemingly dealing with the game’s sprawling worlds with few problems, while nicely aping Nintendo’s own in-house work. The camera regularly zooms in and out, by turns picking out cinematic little details, then swooping up to turn the whole stage into a tilt-shift toybox. In TV mode, there’s some murkiness around the edges, and things noticeably chug when there are a few too many particle effects in close-up, but that was a rare occurrence in my time with the game. I haven’t seen the game in handheld mode but, barring any extra performance dips, I can imagine that being the way to play, making full use of the Switch’s lovely screen sheen.
There’s a serendipity to this game coming out on Switch specifically - both the game and the console are stuck halfway between two seemingly opposing ideas: handheld and home, Mario’s welcoming charm and XCOM’s hardcore appeal. And, like the Switch, Mario + Rabbids feels as though it’s balancing both sides surprisingly well. While its tactical intrigue may end up a little on the slim side for dyed-in-the-wool strategists, the unexpected joy of these two worlds colliding might well be enough to keep players watching Peach incinerate her opponents through to the end - it’s weird, but it works.
Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and he wants Rabbid Peach in the next Smash Bros. Follow him on Twitter.
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