Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle Review │ We Are Now Crossing Over

how do you do - my friends are low here and today we're reviewing Mario and Rabbids Kingdom battle it's the crossover no one would have seen coming in a million years a marriage of Nintendo's beloved Mario franchise and Ubisoft's clan of crazed dimension-hopping rabbit like creatures so will it end up being a tactical triumph or a strategic slog let's find out [Music] I'm gonna get this out of the way first I like the Rabbids I've never been like a huge fan or anything but I love silly visual comedy and that's what Rabbids have always been about and while the game they were born out of Ramon's Raving Rabbids was only okay it was held up by those characters by the oddball humor they brought it sounds like the Rabbids are decently popular in France though within the American gaming public opinions are mixed and any kind of popularity the rabbit's could have gained in the US was usurped by minions which are basically the same thing except without the humor I bore these little creatures no ill-will going in and if you have any reservations I highly suggest you set them aside because if you do you're gonna find an excellent game stuffed to the gills with humor and charm Mario and rabbits has way more of a story than I ever expected but I'll just sum it up and say that a rabbit gets its hands on a pair of goggles that can merge two objects together and he and his brethren break through into the Mario universe and wreak havoc most Rabbids are turned into baddies but a few stick around to help you on your quest to track down the rabbit that caused the whole mess and really the story is the kind ideally which was present in more mario games it's not the deepest thing in the world not anything close to something like the first few paper Mario's but definitely on the level of Color Splash you are mostly moving in a straight line plot wise trying to get to that one rabid but there are tons of fun cutscenes and events along the way and even a handful of characters if you're listening Nintendo please notice how when you let what is essentially a group of fans make a game about Mario they give it a good story because most of your fans like stories and wish there were better stories anyway it's the animations in the humor that really make all this shine it's always fun to watch the Rabbids interact with Mario and his team and with the world operating purely like I said earlier on visual comedy even just the faces the baddies make had me chuckling aloud on several occasions visually that marriage between Mario and Rabbids is executed flawlessly firstly the graphics are just plain nice they've got that smooth toy light quality we saw in Super Mario 3d World then I already talked about how the crossover works stylistically in my previous video card in the corner if you haven't seen it but I'll touch on it again here the two Styles never clash and in fact they feel right at home together it's too much fun moving through the Mario world with its colorful geometric shapes and happy flowery hills and clear blue water and seeing how the Rabbids have just absolutely messed it all up the landscape is littered with giant real-world objects sometimes making the mushroom kingdom look like a kid's messy room the game only has four main worlds but each one is split into differently themed sections and these visual changes keep each world feeling fresh as you make your way to the end taking in these landscapes and relishing all the little details is delightful world 3 is the weakest of the bunch I'd say but a world 4 has them all beat in terms of awesome varied set pieces Plus everywhere you go you'll find Rabbids just hanging around and being weird I mean around every corner just all over the place you'll find these funny little animations and each of them is unique these are a joy to hunt down and beepo your robot guide on this adventure never fails to give some funny commentary and speaking of the overworld I was really pleased with how much there is to do between battles most tactical strategy games have you hopping around a world map but here you'll spend tons of time running around and hunting for goodies there are even puzzles you need to solve in order to move forward and I love mason puzzles these get more frequent and challenging the further you progress which of course just means more fun and satisfying I mean there are a lot more puzzles than I ever expected and it makes the game feel much more like a Nintendo type adventure the world is just brimming with treasure chests and there are a number of ways to find them sometimes you just got to make your way to them sometimes you need to collect eight red coins within a time limit sometimes you've got a complete timed bonus room challenges and even better beating the world grants you new abilities you can use to unlock secrets so you'll have to explore each area multiple times to find everything I generally do like a more open world to explore but I actually came to appreciate this mostly linear level design each world has a relatively straight path to the end but that path branches off here and there and leads you to more secrets if things were more open it would take ages to comb through and pick up all the collectables whenever you found a new ability but this way it's relatively easy to just run through and see what you can find it's more true to Mario's a2b nature but offers just enough freedom to keep it interesting and what do you find in all these treasure chests you might be asking well you can get songs and artwork and 3d models for your museum as well as unlocking new weapons to buy and earning orbs to use for leveling up if there's one problem with the overworld that's not actually a problem but more a testament to the great set design sometimes the locales are so packed with fun visual stuff but it's a bummer there isn't more to interact with you'll pretty much know whenever you found a puzzle or a secret but you'll often be wishing you could go - all these weird structures and explore more nooks and crannies and find some of the stuff your imagination tells you must be hiding somewhere then if there's a problem that's probably not actually a problem per se but is certainly annoying the camera is pretty restrictive you can rotate it but it too frequently becomes fixed when you're passing through certain areas making it a little harder to view the landscape from the angle you want you also can't point it upward so sometimes it made me feel a little claustrophobic and I took a happy little breath of fresh air whenever the camera turned itself up toward the sky to show me something important complimenting the world very nicely is a score composed by grant kirkhope video game music extraordinaire working on a Mario game for the first time I might add and the game songs are appropriately wonderful this new take on the peaches castle theme is going to be a permanent fixture in my future vgm playlists and I've been humming the midboss theme to myself for two weeks straight no joke I will say though that the music isn't exactly what I expected Mario's music is usually poppy and a little jazzy and I thought that the Rabbids would bring more Zayn eNOS to it but what we ended up with here was mainly traditional orchestrations they're often frantic and even comedic ly over the top in a flight of the bumblebee sword away but sometimes it feels like they play things a little too safe like I said it's all terrific music I love it but I think I would have liked a little more spunkiness particularly outside of battle maybe keep the battle music the way it is but make the overworld theme a little more Mario like just something to change things up and set the mood a little differently I mean this is a crazy world we're moving through and I feel like violins and horns don't always communicate that effectively but wait a minute here forget the music forget fantastical landscapes what was that I was saying a few minutes ago weapons leveling up do you mean to tell me this isn't just a game where Mario and Rabbids run around looking for stuff no my friends this games got combat and all that other stuff is just icing on the cake this is where the game gets really good Mario and rabbits is a turn-based tactical strategy type game but it's way different from the other TBH TSG T's that I've played the biggest difference and the thing that makes this far and away my favorite tactical whatchamacallit game I've ever played is the freedom it gives you within a turn first off you can move the character really far even just by themselves and moving diagonally just counts is moving one square at a time which I've personally never seen but to add to that if you move a guy to another guy you can team jump off of them opening up your range of movement even further and even vaulting to higher ground or if you enter a pipe even if you used up your last square of movement you always get a certain number of squares coming out of a pipe depending on your stat with a little luck and careful planning you can chain all this together and move your guys around all over the map even better you can run into an enemy to deal some extra damage and Mario even has an ability where he can team jump onto an enemy then land wherever he wants so movement in this game is really so much more than just movements strategically freedom of movement is an all you've got though you're also free to perform a ton of actions during a turn no matter what unless of course you're impeded by some nasty status effect you can always move and shoot someone and use one of your special abilities which are always fully charged and during a battle abilities and secondary weapons have cooldown times no magic bars to refill or anything like that all of this comes together to form the most open streamlined unrestricted tactical experience I've ever played it's a far cry from most games where you inch across the board with your tiny diamonds of movement and you've got like one ranged character if you're lucky and you're special takes up your whole attack and only if you've spent eight turns building up enough mana you can do so much here that you'll spend 10-15 minutes or even more on a match then get to the end and be shocked that the whole thing only lasted four turns as you can imagine this freedom does have an effect on the strategy aspect of the game it means that it's a little hard to plan ahead things change so quickly that it can be easy for the enemy to flank you and deliver a swift beatdown but of course that goes both ways so then the strategy lies less in how you play over the long game and more and how you have you guys work together within each individual turn it's less about slowly working to trap your opponents and control the board more about dealing as much damage and taking out as many baddies as possible and I'd say all this fits Mario very well this relative simplicity and focus on teamwork and mobility is exactly what I would expect from a Mario tactics game as far as attacking goes every characters got some kind of gun and they differ in ranged damage and chance for a critical hit that deals status effects like attack halting Inc and movement halting honey most primary weapons have a very comfortable range which again makes it easier to both deal and take lots of damage in a turn some characters have short range secondary weapons that can do a great deal of damage in an area some have grenades that can bounce over cover and some have sentries with their own range of movement that can sneak around walls or even chase guys across the map and draw fire these all do area damage and it's important to remember that any teammates caught in the blast will take damage friendly fire alone brings a lot of extra strategy to the mix because different characters work better at either close or long range and avoiding that friendly fire is a must then to add another layer of cheese to this veritable taco salad of tactics the emphasis on gunplay brings with it a great cover system each battlefield is littered with blocks and partial cover means that enemies have a 50% chance to hit you and full cover means that they have no chance at all you can hide behind anything but the Mario style blocks are particularly cool because they can be broken even if an enemies hiding behind one it's still worth taking a shot because eventually you'll wear it down and they drop coins when they go some blocks are even hiding special effect blocks which explode when hit inflicting unpleasantness upon anyone unfortunate enough to be close by the cover system is great because not only does it completely greater strategic experience but also because the game never leaves you guessing if you're gonna hit a guy there's no accuracy step here the game tells you in no uncertain terms what your chances to hit are 0% 50% or if a guy's not covered at all 100% guaranteed no random misses to worry about I also like how it tells you the range of damage you can expect to do in relation to a guy's remaining health with a very clear indication of when he is most definitely toast special abilities play a huge part in battle each hero has to and they do the kind of stuff you'd expect up your movement range for the turn he'll you scare off enemies etc the non rabid characters each have a special that lets them take an extra shot at the first enemy to move inside their range and this is a fun and immensely satisfying ability especially when your guys are trading back and forth blasting the pants off some poor rabid schmuck just trying to get from one place to another in addition to unique weapons and stats all these specials help to differentiate the characters and are another thing to think about when suiting up the game doesn't have a traditional leveling system like an RPG but your weapons get better as you find them throughout the world and the skill tree handles the rest of the powering up the currency here is orbs and winning them at the end of a battle means you won them for everybody on your roster whether or not they were in your team each character has a skill tree and while many of the options are the same across the board they've all got their fair share of unique stats to pick out you can increase your hero's health mcdhh a Shazz deal more damage increase the damage to enemies on lower ground lots of stuff increasing the effectiveness of specials and decreasing their cooldowns is very important as they progressively more useful as you move through the game and remember that whole freedom thing I kept going on about well have you ever played an RPG or something and at some point realized that you just really messed up a character putting XP into skills you just don't use and giving it the wrong stats and all that in Mario in Rabbids you don't like a hero's build boom reset it any time as many times as you want doesn't even cost anything I'm not quite patient enough to reset over and over again to make sure I've got the perfect build but I love that I have the option if I mess something up or I want to try out a different strategy and for those who are SuperDuper into playing the game as perfectly as possible reassigning stats to suit the situation can be a regular part of pre battle the game is basically like play however you want we're not going to stop you I will say though the character roster is a little weak I'm fine with the fact that it's only for Mario mainstays and rabid versions of each it's how they perform functionally that I've got an issue with not enough of them feel valuable to me so I don't find much of a reason to switch them out the problem starts with Mario being a permanent member of your three-man lineup he's a fine character but doesn't have any particular strengths beyond like his stomp jump this means your other two guys need to balance things out Luigi is the only long-range player here making him invaluable especially with his triple shot steely stare and a century so after that I always need a healer because there's no other way to restore your HP during a battle and within a chapter the best you can hope for is to find a mushroom in the overworld and those become less helpful as the game goes on thing is there are only 2 healers here peach and rabid peach peach can restore little HP for everyone in range every time she team jumps but her short range shotgun type gun makes her dangerous to keep close to your other characters especially with her instachat ability which can go off in any direction depending on the enemy's movement she demands contradicting play styles and on top of that you got to have at least one rabbit on your team so I pick rabid peach who can heal has good range and has a useful century like Luigi does so peaches out and rabid Luigi Yoshi and rabid Yoshi don't do any one thing well enough to warrant using them so I never do rabid Mario can dash a ton of times and blasts every baddie within range each time he does so he's dangerous to be close to but can inflict serious damage to guys who are grouped close together because of this he's just about the only other character I switched to sometimes but only on maps that really fit him well which are pretty few and far between so base I've spent probably 90 or even 95% of the game just playing as Mario Luigi and rabid peach I understand that Mario's got to be around for all the cutscenes and all that but even just freeing up his spot would go a long way in encouraging different character combinations it would mean that the other guys who are just a little too much like him wouldn't be too redundant to be useful to segue into another issue Mario and rabbits is a little light on content though how much of an issue this is is up for debate my very rough playtime estimate for the main campaign is 15 hours and I can definitely see how some might see that as short considering this is a genre where a simply constructed map any scattering of enemies can take 15 minutes of playtime debate it's very easy to pad out a tactics game but I would say that overall the pacing is good enough that's simply tacking on more levels wouldn't necessarily be a good thing it would kind of just make the campaign a little more tedious as an example each world has unique hazards that change things up on the battlefield these help keep things fresh but at the same time if they were used too much more than they already are they would grow tiresome as it is I would often reach the end of a world and think man that was fun I wish there was more but then I would realize that there didn't really need to be more if I wanted more of what I just played I could just start a new file and play through the game again the scenarios are unique enough that repeat playthroughs will probably be just as fun one thing I do wish the game had though and something that would actually justify a longer length is more enemy variety at first the game feeds you new batty types at a steady rate but once you hit the last world you realize you're stuck with the same handful of guys and they start to get a little bit stale even just one or two more would have made a big difference though I will say that all the different bosses and mid bosses helped there were definitely some cool ones even if they were mostly one offs there's stuff to do outside of the campaign and this stuff sort of helps bring up the game's value but also doesn't quite hit the mark sometimes first off you can return to any chapter and try for a perfect score meaning you beat each battle within the move limit and have no character knockouts each world also includes a hidden chapter to find and complete then there are ten additional challenge maps per world and that's a pretty significant number of levels right there the problem is that your team's weapons and skills and everything carry with you wherever you go no matter what mode you're playing in meaning that getting perfect scores and beating challenges is just a matter of coming back later when you're stronger and stomping everybody you have to make a pretty big effort to do all this before you get too far in the game if you want to have a fun level of challenge and of course that kind of management isn't exactly fun we shouldn't have to do that I was pleasantly surprised to find that the game has a co-op mode that uses one switch and sees two friends picking two characters each and trading off to complete a handful of maps for each of the game's worlds after playing so much of the main game it's really refreshing to work with someone else to complete a goal it requires very clear and careful communication and even just having four characters on a map is fun the biggest problem here is that there are just not enough maps this is made better by the fact that this mode comes with three difficulty settings potentially tripling the playtime but only if you play at exactly the right times like what the other modes or else easy and medium are so easy they're basically throwaways having difficulty settings across all modes would help tremendously though also helpful would be challenges that scale to your strength level or even scale your strength level to their difficulty whatever the case it should be something because as it is these extra modes offer an okay amount of extra content but don't quite hit that sweet spot I want with a full-priced game there's one thing that would make all game lengths priced value arguments null and void and that's a map editor unfortunately such a feature is not present the co-op mode is great but being able to make and share our own maps would be even greater and it would mean Mario and Rabbids was playable basically forever seeing as Ubisoft announced dlc and a season passed well before the game was released though I guess it's obvious why they neglected to include such a thing it's a bummer for sure but in today's gaming landscape I guess it's not exactly surprising hey who knows maybe we'll get lucky and a map editor will come included in some feature DLC hey hey okay moving on before we wrap this up I have one more small gripe that I couldn't comfortably fit anywhere else each world is split up into chapters each chapter containing sometimes one or three but most often two battles this is a little annoying because battles can be fairly long and you can't turn off the game or even exit to Peach's castle in the middle of a chapter without losing your progress on another home console I wouldn't consider this as much of a problem but it's kind of at odds with the switches pick up and play on and off nature in my relatively short time with the game there have been multiple occasions where I wanted to play some co-op or hop onto splatoon for some salmon run but I was between battles in a chapter so I had to sit there and fight the whole second battle before I could do anything or just cut my losses and redo the first battle later even more annoying overworld progress is also tied to chapters and there were times I booted up the game just to find that I had to redo a complicated puzzle Andrey pick up some collectibles it just doesn't seem like it would be that hard to save progress a little more exactly you know I know I had a lot to complain about but that's just what I do don't let the games shortcomings fool you Mario and Rabbids Kingdom battle is an awesome awesome game and you want to know why that is it's a labor of love look no further than creative director Davide so Leone for proof this is the kind of thing that happens when a group of lifelong Mario fans get the go-ahead to make a Mario game this is what can happen when Nintendo releases their treasured IPS to outside companies Ubisoft took their own series and injected it into Nintendo's creating a fresh take on Mario's world that offers something so unique something we never would have gotten straight from Nintendo themselves it's funny to feel this way now after the initial idea seemed so weird and even unnecessary but this is an important game important because if this goes well maybe Nintendo will start being more open to lending out their IPs but also important because it's a high-profile third-party game developed exclusively for the switch and its performance might just end up having an impact on future development for the system from Ubisoft and from others as well yeah it ain't perfect and it could offer a little more in the way of content but it's still a phenomenal experience from start to finish and completely deserving of your time and really its shortcomings just remind me how incredible a sequel could be more characters more enemies more weapon types more modes new ways to move around the map imagine a full co-op campaign where you and your friends start from scratch and level up through a gauntlet of stages that idea plus the idea of a map editor just about has me drooling it's a game with basically unlimited room to build upon we've just got to keep our fingers crossed that it sells I'm both surprised and delighted to give Mario and Rabbids Kingdom battle a very solid 6 out of 7 and a very high recommendation before we go it's time for an Arlo direct our low Palooza 20-17 is right around the corner and if you haven't heard about it yet then you haven't been paying attention but I'll put a link to the event page down in the description anyway point is though I've launched an IndieGoGo campaign to help cover the costs and every single extra penny raised is going to go straight toward making this an event to remember so even if you're not able to make it I can't even express how much a small donation would be appreciated I'm also including a link to the IndieGoGo down there in the description so check it out if you're feeling generous and if you're one of the folks who can make it in October I can't wait to see you there other Palooza [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Arlo

Views: 422,991

Keywords: puppet, puppets, puppetry, blue, monster, silly, humor, funny, comedy, nintendo, switch, mario, rabbids, rayman raving rabbids, ubisoft, crossover, super mario bros., review, critique, is it good, tactics, turn based, adventure, video games, gaming

Id: y5GsFoVSWcA

Length: 20min 42sec (1242 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 08 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/KodiBishop]

Yeah I've been watching Arlo for good year now and I love this guy.

[u/flapjack626]

GOD I love this YouTuber

[u/Rockchurch]

He says World 3 is the weakest from a design standpoint, I found it to be by far the best.

I want to spend WAY more time in that haunted castle, halloween town, spooky carnival. Especially with the music.

Also, he says there's no other way to restore health during a battle than by using a healer (Peach/rPeach). This is completely wrong. rLuigi's vamp dash applies vamp so any hero that attacks the enemy that turn heals from it. And rMario has a number of vamp-effect weapons.

[u/[deleted]]

Holy shit a good youtuber lol