Sparks of Hope teaches the plumber to shoot around corners ★★★★☆

In particle physics, physicists try to unravel the structure of all matter and radiation in the universe by colliding atoms at the speed of light. In this way they keep discovering new, smaller elementary particles.

Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is the Higgs boson of the game world.

The computer game originated from a clash of Super Mario and Rabbids. The first has been Japan’s best-known game character since the mid-1980s, the second a gang of madcap rabbits who went from supporting roles to headlining since their debut in a French game in 2006. Just like the minions from Despicable Me (2010) the Rabbids have long surpassed their master.

There is always a risk with such a crossover, the phenomenon whereby figures from one computer game appear in the world of another. The fans don’t want their heroes to be messed with. For example, the internet was too small at the beginning of this month when a trailer appeared from the upcoming cartoon Super Mario Bros. Movie. In it, the world’s most famous plumber no longer produced shrill nonsense beeps, but turns out to be speaking in the impeccable English of the American actor Chris Pratt.

Sparks of Hope builds on Kingdom Battle from 2017, Mario and the Rabbids’ first adventure, which garnered as much praise as amazement. What was Ubisoft, the French publisher behind the Rabbids games, doing in the Mushroom Kingdom, the kingdom where the plumber has spent 40 years saving Princess Peach from the clutches of the evil dragon Bowser?

live chess game

Kingdom Battle turned out not to be the climbing and clambering adventure for which the Super Mario series is known, but an amazingly deep strategic thinking game in which the player is dropped on a different battlefield and has to defeat a group of opponents in three turns.

Think of a kind of living chess game, in which you may not make one move on each turn, but you can make three, and where you can also sit out the opponent’s moves and then strike back hard and triumphantly. Each new battle requires careful consideration of weapon deployment, position and special skills. Sometimes you find the enemy behind obstacles that you have to take down first, for example with grenades that can fly around a corner.

New in Sparks of Hope are the cartoon-like stars, sparks, that you can win in the game and that give a tactical advantage or some other aid that increases your chances on the battlefield.

Sparks of Hope also offers other improvements over Kingdom Battle. For example, your fighters are no longer pinned to a specific square like pawns on a chessboard, but you can freely position Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach and their Rabbid lookalikes within a larger defined area. That in turn gives you all kinds of strategic advantages: you can move out of the path of a shot or in it, to lure the enemy out of his cover.

Inveterate followers of Super Mario will shake their heads at many of the liberties the French have allowed themselves with the Mario formula. Rabbids fans too, by the way: the rabbits have lost a lot of their anarchic craziness: the humor is often well-behaved and flat.

But still: this is another game that makes short work of the unjustly ‘childish’ image of Nintendo and the Switch game consoles. Yes, older gamers will have to bite through a thin and insignificant narration and a sugary sugar coating. But behind this candy-colored disguise lies a formidable strategic challenge.