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XCOM gives you all kinds of simulation elements outside of battle to get an advantage over the invading aliens. Character development is nowhere near as complex. Battles are lighter, quicker, and over faster. But it’s much simpler, tactically, than XCOM. It has the same basic model of XCOM, in that small groups of soldiers on each side skirmish against one another, making heavy use of cover and special abilities to control the battlefield and defeat enemies. Perhaps he has a grandfather that works at Ubisoft or Nintendo or wherever that rumour that the game was actually good came from. We now expected that surely it would play as well it looked. One gameplay trailer and we flipped completely. Not just on the Switch, but across all platforms. Somehow Trent knew that, yes, Mario + Rabbids was indeed one of the best games of the year. The more we saw the more we realised that Trent had somehow called it. “Oh my Lord what is this?” Asked another. “Is… is this bleeping XCOM?” One of us asked.
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Then Ubisoft started to show bits of gameplay.Īs a group our mouths collectively dropped. So we were all sitting there on a group chat during the Ubisoft show, making fun of poor Trent for his unwavering faith in this game that none of us actually knew anything about. With the exception of DDNet contributor Trent P, who was, we all assumed, joking when he said that the Mario and Rabbids game would be one of the highlights of the year, none of the DDNet team had any expectations for this one whatsoever. This, of course, was all before E3 rolled around and we saw the game in action for the first time. Childish slapstick humour and genuinely ugly character design (because the “demented stupid” look is apparently funny) wasn’t going to be something that Mario and his friends would be able to save. On title and premise alone I was instantly turned off it.
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I can’t think of a “Mario” game that I had less interest in than the idea of a Mario and Rabbids crossover when it was first rumoured, then confirmed without any further concrete information.
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