10 Video Games MUCH Better Than We Thought They'd Be

9. Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle is kind of a fever dream video game that shouldn’t exist. When it was announced that Ubisoft and Nintendo were smashing together the Mario and Rabbids IPs to create a brand new game whose gameplay is largely reminiscent of X-COM, few people really knew what to think, and even fewer thought there was any chance they’d actually be able to pull this off.

And yet, here we are in 2022 and not only was Kingdom Battle a smash hit, its sequel just launched to critical praise, too.

The key here is that somehow these two properties that could easily have spawned a pretty basic game largely targeted at younger audiences, instead offered up some genuinely nuanced and even challenging gameplay. The turn-based combat is satisfying, the tactical strategy elements work way better than anybody expected them to, and the quirky characters are oozing with charm.

Mario + Rabbids as an idea and a concept shouldn’t work, but it does, and you can’t argue with results.