Amazing
Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is a major leap forward from atop the shoulders of its surprisingly smart and charming predecessor, bringing a wonderful amount of flexibility to its turn-based tactical battles.
Verdict
Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope takes the excellent tactical combat ideas of Kingdom Battle and runs absolutely wild with them. Its goofy characters still have the ability to bounce off of each other, but they’re now free of the rigid grid and wonderfully customizable thanks to the mix-and-match Sparks that give them new and reliably interesting powers. Between fights you get to catch your breath in the large and brilliantly colorful open worlds, solving its light puzzles and being puzzled yourself by its oddball story. It’s extremely gratifying to play an ambitious sequel that fixes all of the main issues I had with the original, and then some.
