Here’s a great deal on an excellent game that many Switch owners slept on when it first came out. The colorful, turn-based strategy game Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is on sale at Amazon for $29.99 right now. That’s the lowest price we’ve seen on this game. Also, it’s unclear how long the sale will last, so grab it if you’ve had your eye on it.
Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope Deal
This Nintendo Switch exclusive is a sequel to the 2017 game Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. But instead of doing a copy-paste job, Ubisoft brings a bunch of major changes and improvements to this crossover sequel. The overworld is expanded and sprinkled with puzzles. Battles are more dynamic this time around, thanks in large part to new movement mechanisms that let you cross the map quickly, giving you tons of leeway in your battle strategy.
Also mixing things up is the addition of Sparks, critters you collect and equip in order to broaden your characters’ ability sets. Sparks let you do everything from adding elemental charges to your attacks to reviving fallen teammates. You can equip two Sparks to each character, creating clever and powerful combos, if you play your cards right.
In our Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope review, critic Dan Stapleton scored it 9/10, writing:
Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope takes the excellent tactical combat ideas of Kingdom Battle and runs absolutely wild with them. Its goofy characters still have the ability to bounce off of each other, but they’re now free of the rigid grid and wonderfully customizable thanks to the mix-and-match Sparks that give them new and reliably interesting powers. Between fights you get to catch your breath in the large and brilliantly colorful open worlds, solving its light puzzles and being puzzled yourself by its oddball story. It’s extremely gratifying to play an ambitious sequel that fixes all of the main issues I had with the original, and then some.
Chris Reed is a deals expert and commerce editor for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed or on Mastodon @chrislreed.