Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope

The first hour is the worst part. Sparks of Hope front-loads a slow, chatty tutorial with a talking robot who explains things you figured out two rooms ago, and if you bounced off it there, I get it. Push through, because the combat underneath is doing something almost nobody else in turn-based tactics does: it ditches the grid entirely. You get a free-movement bubble each turn, and inside it you can dash into enemies for damage, chain team jumps off allies, reposition behind cover, and then fire, all in one action. It turns every turn into a little puzzle about routing rather than counting squares. The Sparks system is where the build depth lives. Each hero equips two, and they layer elemental effects (burn, freeze, gust) onto weapons, so you're stacking status combos across a party of three from a roster that mixes Mario, Rabbid oddballs, and later joiners. It works. What doesn't: the overworld exploration is padded with fetch quests and puzzle busywork that exist to stretch the runtime, and the difficulty rarely pressures you into using the systems fully. Play it for the fights, skim the rest.

Alex · Scout Team

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