Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle E3 2017 Impressions

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle was one of the more surprising games of E3 2017 as I honestly didn't expect anything good from it. I'm not huge on Rabbids and would have never thought they'd get paired up with Mario. That being said, I actually really enjoyed what I played and found it to be a very distinct experience. It's got the aesthetics of a Nintendo game with the bright colors, joking characters and the outfits while still being a unique title. It's a nice bridge between the two franchises and it somehow works well.

You get to select a team of characters and then battle formations of enemies within small portions of the world. After each portion is completed you run with your team along the path similar to what you would do in a regular Mario game and then get to the next patch of enemies. Combat is then rather interesting as well taking a turn based approach that's swift. You pick a character from your squad and then either move or attack. You can shift to better cover, fire at them or even jump at them. The jump then allows the option to move after and shoot so this approach was ultimately the best option. Every member of the team also gets a chance per turn and then the enemies get their chance to strike.



There are also variations to the environments that can help out such as destroying explosive barrels or running through pipes to sneak behind enemies. Cover can be destroyed if there's an enemy hidden behind it and I was surprised by the depth within combat. It was also slightly odd seeing Mario with a gun, but it's a fun gun so that's alright apparently. I don't particularly mind the gun aspect as most of what I play is shooters, just something different for Mario. It all worked rather well and I'm interested to see how much additional depth is available between the different types of characters.

What I played was limited and I did a few waves of the action across multiple little sections to get an idea before switching to my next Nintendo game. This was all at the Nintendo press play area so you can expect coverage for each of the games they had available. I was just rather impressed with Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle as I didn't have high expectations for it going in and it was far better than I had anticipated. It looks like this could be a big deal for Ubisoft and Nintendo for the Switch since it feels greatly polished.

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