I love a lot of the clever ways this streamlines fidgety norms of squad tactics games, and how the heroes provide distinctly different strengths and team compositions, and that the character leveling gives a decent number of rule-breaking abilities instead of just “10% more damage” type stuff. The slapstick writing is mostly pretty cute and rarely annoying, and the missions can get surprisingly challenging.

It’s a shame then, that this is a great 20-25 hour game that Ubisoft decided instead to make 40-50+ hours. For every minute of clever mission design that demands thoughtful squad choices and mid-mission maneuvering, there’s just as much time spent on the equivalent of old JRPG random field battles, 1-2 turn snores that require no thought and are just begging for a faster way to skip through all the animation and end battle screen overhead of each fight. There’s also an odd clumsiness to moving characters and aiming them at interaction items, ironic given Mario’s longtime reputation as a pioneer and standard-bearer of great 3D platforming game feel.

UbiBloat strikes again, but the underlying charm still shines through a decent bit.