*Review in progress

Sparks of Hope is one of my favorite games, not even counting all of its expansions. I might review the standalone game some other time, but for now, I want to talk about all of its DLC packs in the order that I've been playing them, starting with the Rayman expansion.

This was so, so, so good man. Incredible even, I would say. The base game set such a high standard of quality in every regard, and I can at least say that this DLC meets that standard. It's hard for me to say if it surpasses it, because the base game and this DLC are both extremely similar but also very different beasts that can be hard to compare. Even if I can't really make a definitive statement on that, this was still an awesome expansion that met my expectations nearly effortlessly, while also going in a direction that I didn't envision for it.

Gameplay wise, the base game already was one of the most mechanically rich games I've ever played, and I can say the same thing here. The battle system might just be the strongest that I've seen in any game to date, but talking about that in detail here would take me forever, so I'll leave that for another day. I will instead start by addressing what Rayman's inclusion does for the game on a mechanical level.

The base game provides insane customization options through 9 party members, all with distinct abilities and a bunch of sparks that any character can equip at any time. This DLC scales that back by limiting the player to using 3 party members at any time, those being Rayman, Rabbid Peach and Rabbid Mario. Rayman additionally can't equip any sparks, so that limits things further. The designers counterbalanced this by making Rayman the most versatile character in the game by a huge margin. This mainly comes through the inclusion of two costumes he can wear mid-battle: the Vortex and Rocket costumes.

These two costumes serve as brilliant mechanics that gives the player a million viable options through one single character, some of which are even analogue to what sparks allow. Each costume not only opens up a unique ability, but also alters the properties and parameters of Rayman's plunger gun and sentries. These can either pull enemies towards you, push them away from you, or deal AOE damage. All of them are very useful on their own, but even moreso while synergizing with other abilities. Part of the reason this entire game's combat system works so well is that even though every option you're given inside of battle is often still useful in a vacuum, you're always encouraged to see how each one can be used in conjunction with another one (or multiple other ones) to truly take advantage of them. Rayman's toolkit perfectly encapsulates this design philosophy, since every tool is versatile enough to synergize with Rayman's other tools, those of the other rabbids, or both at the same time. This here is a big element that makes this such a strategically rich and deep game, and it was well preserved in this DLC.

However, to address the main reason that I'm not sure if I prefer it to the main game, the fact that Rayman can't equip sparks is a bit of an problem. One small issue that I already had with the game was that you're given 30 sparks, all of which provide a huge array of buffs, debuffs, elemental properties and unique effects, but you can only equip 6 of them at most. To give credit, the game is well designed around the limitation and does do a good job of encouraging the player to equip different sparks through enemy weaknesses/resistances and the different map layouts. Despite this, there's times where this limitation can lead you to rely on a small amount of sparks that might seem more advantageous more often.

This maybe could've been remedied by allowing each character to equip 3 sparks instead of 2 around the endgame, but I'm not sure. That's the kind of design choice that could have serious repercussions on the game's design and throw all balance out of whack, so I can't really say. I'm not a professional game designer, so I'm sure there's something that would be ruined that I can't even conceive. It's not really a big deal, but it's something I always think about when playing this game.

Rayman in the Phantom Show unfortunately makes this a bigger problem. Since Rayman can't equip even a single one, and each of the rabbids still can only equip 2 of them, you can only use 4 sparks at once. It doesn't help that this expansion has 9 more sparks than the base game (though most of the new ones were added in previous DLC packs), which means you have even MORE options to choose from but less that you can actually pick. This made it so I relied on the some of the same sparks even more, and there's other ones that I picked way less, if ever. It still isn't a big issue in my opinion (and the fact that it's the worst thing I can say about it speaks volumes to how good it is), but it does give me pause for thought in regards to this being better than the main game.

To go back to talking about positives, this expansion's theming is awesome. The dev team came up with a very creative scenario here, even when they easily could've relied on Rayman to bring back areas from his series. It takes place in the Space Opera Network, which in other words is a TV studio. The story here is framed around the return of the Phantom, and how he wants the heroes to help his ratings go up. It's not only a funny premise, but also one that paves way for lots of other really cool things.

First off, exploring three movie sets that were built to actually look like sets is super cool. Everything you interact with is a prop or a piece of equipment, whether it's cardboard cutouts of creatures or background elements, cranes, stage lights or cameras. It's always fun in a meta sort of way when a piece of media replicates the production of a show or a movie to such an extent, and it requires very careful attention to detail to pull off well. It absolutely was pulled off well here. The game also takes advantage of the setting by making lots of jokes around the production pipeline of a series, some of which went deeper than I would've expected. They make jokes out of acting, scriptwriting, blocking, critics and even treatment of employees. It's funny stuff, even if it's also a bit depressing to think that some of the harsher jokes they make aren't even far off from reality. Still, it's a weirdly transparent look into this kind of environment that I never would've expected out of this game especially, but I appreciate it.