Taking two franchises are combining them always make a interesting result. When the formal announcements of a Mario and Raving Rabbids game was going to be released, have to say I was a bit interested and after seeing the game play I decided that I would give this game a chance. After playing through it, it is a really good game.

Mario+Rabbids Kingdom Battle good game all the way around. The world Mario and Rabbids when the Rabbids time/dimension traveling machine lands in the basement of an inventor who made goggles that can fuse two items together to make a new one. After zapping their machine, the Rabbids open a tear in Mario’s world and the world is filled with chaotic Rabbids and other weird fusions. The look of the world is lovely to look at and the cut scenes are well made. There are about 4 worlds to explore, each having 9 chapters in each one. They are filled with chest to collect to gather weapons to buy, points for your skill tree, art and music as well. The terrain of get world is filled with special ways to move about and puzzles to solve to get past obstacles. Some the paths do require to gain a skill by completing a world and learning a new skill. This adds a bit more game play as using this skills may help find secret places.

The game play of Mario+Rabbids Battle Kingdom is a turn-base strategy tactics games. During the game, you will use a team of three in battles and challenges. At the beginning you will start with Mario, Rabbid Peach, and Rabbid Luigi and through out the game you will unlock Peach, Luigi, Yoshi, Rabbid Mario and Rabbid Yoshi. Each character has set of weapons and skills. During your turn, you can make your character move, attack and/or use a skill to help complete your goal. The weapons in the game are unique in power level and have a critical hit condition, such as making a character not able to move or attack on their turn. Also some weapons will Your character stats, health and addition skills can be unlocked through their skill tree.

There are a few variation of enemies in this game. First are common enemies, such as ziggies, smasher and bucklers, that you will see a different versions of these type of enemies as you world to world. Mid-bosses are unique bosses that utilizes certain combat mechanics. At the end of the world you will face the main boss. These fights require you to drop the boss’ health to zero at least 3 times and usually require you to complete a task before you can do damage. Learning how each enemy works will be needed to help complete future challenges and battles.

There are few different challenges that you will need to complete. Most of them are eliminate all enemies on the field, though this changes at times by giving you a set number enemies to eliminate. The other two task are to get characters to a certain point on or escort a non-combat character, such as toad, to the other end of the map. Having different goals you have to complete helps keep the game from feeling repetitive as there are a lot of battles and challenges in the game.

Though I enjoy a lot about this game, I did find one thing a bit annoying. Team building in this game is restricted to basically choosing two characters and powering up Mario. Mario has to be in the party and it’s not a bad thing given his skills, but it would of been interesting in the story mode to try some other combo of characters. Another restriction of the party is you can have only two Mario World characters. Now, this is due to another issue I have is; Mario, Luigi, Peach and Yoshi all have the same primary ability of Overwatch, or a skill that allows them to attack an enemy if they move within range will prompt them to strike. Though having two characters with this skill can be utilize to take out enemies so they don’t even get a chance, it would of been nice to see Peach and Yoshi have different skills to start off with. However, this did add a fun challenge of figuring out which combo would work the best, so not a total minus to the game.

Now there is DLC and more importantly story DLC coming to this game later. This is a bit annoying as the story didn’t quite wrap up how I thought it would, but I do hope that we will see characters like Donkey Kong added to the roaster. This game is already a handful as some of the battles and challenges can take some time to complete and if you are a completionist type person, which I am not, you will be spending a bit of time finding and completing all items and challenges. All that said, I am very happy with how this game turned out and hoping that this will be the beginning of a new series of these game. If you have Nintendo Switch, I highly recommend you pick up this game, it has hours of game time and offers something new to the Mario World.

Until next time, keep gaming and have fun.

-Mike