Who is Luigi? The brother. The palette swap. The cringer and creeper, chattering Mario’s name as he quakes and trembles in various ghost houses. All true. But there is another Luigi. The Luigi of the hard stare in Mario Kart. The Luigi who barges you off the road and wants you to know it was personal. And now: Luigi the sniper. Death from a distance. A cool heart and a steady gaze. Luigi winning the game and bringing us all home.
Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope reviewPublisher: UbisoftDeveloper: Ubisoft Milan, Ubisoft Paris and other Ubisoft studiosPlatform: Played on SwitchAvailability: Out on Switch on 20th October
Luigi was the sniper in the first Mario + Rabbids, a game that dared to ask, what if you gave everybody in the Mushroom Kingdom a bunch of guns? That’s sort of an awful question, but Ubisoft managed to provide a surprisingly lovely answer for it: you’d get a knockabout version of XCOM. Mario taking cover. Peach healing. Toad going for overwatch. And Luigi sniping.
This Luigi business didn’t click for me until I got stuck into the sequel: Sparks of Hope. Then it clicked instantly. Luigi as a sniper! Luigi with an attack that does more damage the further away from his target he gets. Stick Luigi up high and he becomes a god: in action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like…well, stick him on Overwatch and see. Luigi sniping across the map, wracking up 2000 points of damage. Luigi watching as his enemies shatter into candied star bits. Luigi bringing us all home.
Sparks of Hope takes the basic Mario + Rabbids formula, which is to say the XCOM formula, and adds some neat tweaks. A new storyline sees you leaving the Mushroom Kingdom behind and jetting into outer space, moving between a handful of quirky planets that look like discarded stages from the Galaxy games. There’s a nice rhythm here, even if the planets in the Galaxy games were largely defined by the fact that you moved through them with platforming skills, so they became playgrounds, soft-plays, obstacle courses, rather than the stylish set-dressing you tend to get here. Anyway, that rhythm: you arrive and have to sort things out for the locals. Two main objectives per planet if you’re following the questline, but dozens of side-quests if you’re going for absolutely everything.