Considering my first analysis was for a game that was nearly 30 years old, I’ve decided to tackle something a little more recent. I finished this game a couple weeks ago, so I figured I’d write about it now, while it’s still relatively fresh in my mind.
Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle (MRKB) is a very bizarre concept for a game. Ubisoft decided to take their resident mascots (the Rabbids) and throw them into the Mushroom Kingdom with Mario and the gang. When the world first heard about this, there was obvious skepticism, myself included. However, upon release, many of the big review sites were praising the game as being better than any of them had anticipated. While I was still skeptical, I decided to take the risk and get the game. Oh how I regret that decision…
MRKB has been described as an XCOM style of game. But seeing as I have never played XCOM, that meant little to me. In more layman’s terms, MRKB is a tactical, turn based, grid based combat game. You have a team of three, each armed with unique weapons (usually stylized guns) and skills (although some of the skills were pretty generic across the team), and you are tasked with defeating the enemy team (or fulfilling some other goal). On paper, that sounds like a lot of fun, in execution, I was severely disappointed. I’ll start off, though, by covering what I feel the game got right.
In the beginning, the game was legitimately fun. I was given a team of Mario, and two Rabbids dressed like Peach and Luigi. Each character had skills and weapons that seemed to compliment each other well (Mario was a good all-around unit, R. Luigi was tank-y, and R. Peach could heal). And in the early game, it was a simple matter of dispatching my foes.
Movement around the maps felt good. You could only go so far per turn, but using the terrain to your advantage (like warp pipes that could send you to the other side of a map), or bouncing off your allies to get further ahead helped in the limitation. It also added a nice strategic element, opening up possibilities for combo attacks and getting the drop on your enemy.
The foundation of the game was solid. But it quickly lost all charm and fun.
The game became brutally difficult, very quickly. It wasn’t long before I was forced to play on easy mode, and even then it had it’s moments of frustration. After each battle, on normal difficulty, your team doesn’t get any sort of refresher (unless you stumble upon one of the few super mushrooms, which heal you a small amount). I’ve read that the reasoning behind this is to keep you switching out party members, to keep things fresh, but there are various issues with that philosophy. I like to build up a team I’m comfortable with, and stick with it. If I’m constantly swapping out team members, I’ll never find a groove. The term “jack of all trades, master of none” comes to mind with this kind of forced play. Additionally, there is one particular team mate that can never be swapped out, Mario. So, if Mario is low on health after a battle, I’m stuck with that weakened character going into the next fight, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
It also doesn’t make sense that Mario can’t be swapped. I get that he’s Mario, but he isn’t even the one leading the group. That “honor” goes to a Roomba with rabbit ears, called Beepo. Because of course, every video game needs an annoying “Navi-type” character to tell the player what to do and how to feel at all times.
Going back to combat, like I said, at first, the game was legitimately fun, but that soon changed. It wasn’t long before the game started introducing many new enemies at a rapid pace. These enemies were none too pleasant either. Some could crush you to death with a couple hits (they would also get an additional turn any time they took damage, coming after whoever shot them. While I used this to my advantage at times, many of the maps were too small to avoid these behemoths), others had shields, which forced you to maneuver around them in order to damage them, and others still could just teleport anywhere they wanted. Again, when used properly, none of these enemies would be something I’d complain about, it all seems par for the course in this type of game. But the sheer number that I had to deal with was overwhelming at times, or the map layouts were designed in such a way that it favored the enemies, and I was just scraping by. Couple this with the fact that I had just barely survived the last fight, and my team was still weakened, using the easy mode button pretty much became a necessity.
I’ve heard that XCOM is difficult beyond reason, but as this is technically a Mario title, this would have been an optimal game for players new to the genre, to get their feet wet, and see what it’s all about. Instead, Ubisoft decided to make it just as difficult, turning away any new potential audience. I know I was certainly turned off by it.
Difficulty aside, the game simply dragged. Now on easy mode, pretty much permanently, I was progressing, but I wasn’t having any fun. The combat was dull and repetitive. I’d learned how to deal with the different enemy types. All I could focus on was just powering through, just to finish the game, and be done with it.
The different styles of missions also did nothing to help this game. Most maps were a simple “defeat all enemies” type mission, but there were others, such as defeat a certain number of enemy, and the most hated of all… escort missions…
In certain parts of the game you needed to get a defenseless Toad or some other character across the map, and hope he doesn’t get killed by the never ending waves of enemies. The character you need to escort, is of course, the slowest character, and cannot use jump or any abilities at all. Can I just ask this one thing of all game designers? Can we stop with the escort missions? They’re never fun, it doesn’t matter if it’s the best game in the world, escort mission are never fun. And there’s not a designer in the world that can change that fact. Just… stop.
And then there were the boss fights. Each one was worse than the next. These fights just lasted far too long. The only other trope that I hate as much as escort missions, is boss fights that lie to the player. You “beat” the boss, only for it to regain all its health. Twice. Every time. If you want the boss fight to last a long time, then show the proper amount of health, don’t just refill its health bar multiple times. If this was an occurrence that only happened with one boss, I wouldn’t mind it as much, but it happened every time. And I knew it was coming, every time.
Stepping back from the combat side of things, I would address the fact that there is an exploration side to this game, between combat maps. This was also an exercise in pointlessness. When not in combat, you follow the rabbit Roomba around the map, collect coins, solve puzzles (mostly of the “sliding block” variety), and maybe find a hidden treasure or two. This also, sounded like a lot more fun on paper than in execution. In order to find all the hidden secrets in each world, you need many upgrades for Beepo (all of which are completely unnecessary blockers to progress), one of which you don’t even get until after you beat the game. This means a ton of backtracking for such underwhelming prizes as a piece of concept art. On the rare occasion that you find something useful, like a new weapon, it doesn’t mean you actually have it, it just means that it’s now available to purchase at the store. This bothered me quite a bit. If I jump through all these hoops, backtracking and solving mediocre puzzles, just give me the dang weapon, don’t make it available for purchase.
And a small note on purchasing, unless you’re the kind of sadist that just loves to grind needlessly, you will be hard pressed to have enough coins to buy all those fancy new weapons you find, for each character, that you’re supposedly meant to be swapping out constantly.
I also feel like I need to talk about the game’s aesthetic. Firstly, the Rabbids. I have always avoided games with the juvenile, annoying things whenever possible. They are beyond annoying, and this game proves to be no exception. I never play games on mute, but this one sorely tempted me. The constant screaming drove me mad, “Bwah! Bwah! Bwaaaah!” It got old. Immediately.
And speaking of juvenile, this game’s poor attempts at humor were as sad as they were embarrassing. I suspect 5-year-old kids (and those with the mentality of that age) might get a kick out of it, but that’s it.
One of the worst crimes of all was the overall feel of the game. Make no mistake, this is not a Nintendo game. It looked like a Nintendo game, but upon closer inspection, it was clearly lacking. Even though it was set in the Mushroom Kingdom, environments were dull and lifeless. Game play was boring and repetitive. This is a third-party game with Nintendo characters in it. This fact is painfully clear. The entire time I was playing it, I felt like I was playing a game that was trying to pretend it was made by Nintendo, an impostor. It lacked the polish, it lacked the charm, it lacked the indescribable magic that is present in Nintendo’s best games, the games that have withstood the test of time and continue to be revered as classics to this day.
MRKB was not a game for me, I think I’ve made that obvious. I’m sure there are others that like this style of game play, and even the aesthetic. But for a game to have Mario and company so prominently featured, to have such a strong backing from Nintendo, I expected so much more.