You move a small squad of heroes across a grid, taking cover behind obstacles and combining movement with team-up jumps to reach places a single unit could not. Turns alternate between careful positioning and firing weapons at exposed enemies. The tone is goofy considering it stars Mario characters with guns, but the actual strategy underneath is more demanding than it looks.
Gameplay video
More Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle gameplay on YouTube →Ready to play Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle?
Grab a physical or digital copy from Amazon — prices and availability update live.
This is an affiliate link. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you.
Screenshots & review notes
Why it lands
Nobody believed a Mario and Rabbids crossover could produce a genuinely excellent tactics game, and yet here we are. The writing is goofy, but the strategy underneath is dead serious.
How it plays
Positioning, cover, and team-up jumps create surprisingly deep tactical puzzles, and the difficulty ramps up steadily enough that you're always learning something new.
Style and score
Ubisoft nails the tone, blending Mushroom Kingdom whimsy with slapstick Rabbids humor and a score from Grant Kirkhope that ties it all together nicely.
Who it's for
A great entry point for players intimidated by XCOM-style games, thanks to its approachable difficulty settings. The campaign runs a bit long for how repetitive some maps get.
Frames captured from the gameplay video above; notes are our own take on the game.
What it's like to play
You lead a small squad of Mario characters paired with gun-toting Rabbids, moving them across a grid-based battlefield and choosing between movement, cover, and gunfire each turn. The combination sounds like a joke, but the combat is a genuine tactics game underneath, where dashing through an enemy deals damage, jumping off a teammate's head reaches otherwise unreachable ledges, and lining up a clean shot from cover can turn a losing fight around. Each character carries a primary weapon plus special abilities and a skill tree that grows as you use them in battle, giving you real choices in how to build your team. The look and humor stay firmly in Mario territory, with Rabbid versions of Peach, Luigi, and Mario cracking jokes throughout.
Between battles you walk your squad around small hub worlds looking for hidden chests, optional puzzles, and side objectives, which pad out the otherwise tight tactical structure with some light exploration. As you progress, encounters grow considerably more demanding, asking you to chain movement and attacks across multiple turns to avoid being overwhelmed, and boss fights introduce entirely new mechanics you have to learn on the fly, including one memorable fight built around a musical number. A single battle usually takes ten to twenty minutes, and the full campaign with its extra Donkey Kong Adventure expansion can run well over twenty hours. Chapters can be replayed afterward for players chasing a perfect completion rating.
Session to session, the appeal is in planning out the perfect turn, chaining movements and attacks together like a puzzle before pulling the trigger on your last shot. What might frustrate you is a sharp difficulty increase in the later chapters, and the lack of any real multiplayer beyond a limited co-op option. It is a great fit for anyone curious about tactics games but intimidated by more serious military settings, since the Mario cast keeps things approachable throughout.