Yves Guillemot and Shigeru Miyamoto shared the stage at Ubisoft’s E3 press conference to announce the heavily leaked Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. It’s coming out for Nintendo Switch (it’s obviously an exclusive) on 29th August.
Mario’s weilding a big old laser cannon of some sort in the artwork, with Rabbid versions of the Mario characters running running around. So naturally, Yves and Shigeru posed with those guns as well.
After a bit too long chit chatting, they finally got around to revealing the game, which has been made in Europe by Ubisoft Paris over the last three years. It’s a tactical adventure, set in motion as the two worlds of Mario and Rabbids smashed together, making the world unstable and creating Rabbid versions of all the Mario Kingdom characters. It’s a bit of a bizarre set up.
As a turn based tactical game, the overworld has a fair amount in common with the Mario & Luigi games, as your characters chase after a rabbity Roomba that you control. Entering into battle, it’s pretty much what you’d expect; there’s shades of XCOM, and to a lesser extent, Advance Wars and Fire Emblem, with cover, overwatch, team up attacks, and so on.
It actually looks almost… good? The Donkey Kong Rabbid is something to behold.
