Ubisoft’s press conferences have been pretty solid the last couple of years. They’ve never quite hit the levels of the first-party publishers or anything, but there’s always good stuff. Because of that, I was really surprised by just how good this one turned out. It didn’t even take any time getting to the good stuff. 

The very first reveal of the show was Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. A Mario game at an Ubisoft press conference. Not only that, but Miyamoto was there to pose with toy guns with Ubisoft’s Yves Guillemot and talk a little about how much he admires Ubisoft. So, that was cool. But then they showed off the game and it was better than I could have imagined.

Kingdom Battle was leaked a long time ago, before the Switch was even officially announced. But despite knowing about it, I had no idea that the game was basically an Xcom-style turn-based strategy game. Just like Xcom, you take turns moving your units, making them hide behind cover, and shoot your enemies. There’s also more advanced tactics, like having one unit jump off of another one to go further in a single turn than they normally would be able to. When not in combat, you explore an overworld, much like a traditional RPG. I thought combining Mario and Rabbids was a dumb idea, but I’m absolutely sold.

Speaking of games that got leaked a long time ago, Assassin’s Creed: Origins was finally announced. I’m not a fan of the series, although I also haven’t played one since III. Much like that game, despite not caring about the series, the new setting really interested me. In III, colonial America was such an under-represented time period for a video game that I couldn’t not want to see how it turned out. Now with Origins, we’re in ancient Egypt, a setting that’s extremely different from what we’ve seen before. I’m not sold, I’ve been burned by Assassin’s Creed before, but it has my attention.

There were a couple new IPs shown, which is always welcome. One, Skull and Bones, was a multiplayer pirate game. Although the initial pitch sounded an awful lot like Rare’s Sea of Thieves, it seems to be much more focused on multiplayer combat. From what I could tell, they basically took the ship combat from Assassin’s Creed and made it its own IP. That’s not a bad idea and I’m hopeful that this game will turn out pretty cool.

And then there was Starlink: Battle For Atlas. It seemed pretty neat. It’s a space exploration and combat game with a toys for life twist. You buy toys of ships and weapons that you can customize. You then connect the toy to your controller and it shows up in the game. Potentially really cool, but I’m curious how much money getting the good weapons will cost players.

There were plenty of other games shown that didn’t really a do a lot for me. But then, there was one last game. We get a CG trailer with really detailed anthropomorphic animals. All I needed to see was a gruff looking pig and I knew what we were getting. Beyond Good and Evil 2 is real. Apparently, it’s a prequel set before Jade, the first games protagonist, was even born. The CG trailer was really cool, but I’d really like to see what the game actually looks like. But for a game like this, one that’s been demanded for years and years with no hope in sight, this is really all that I needed.

And that was Ubisoft. It was a really good show with some great reveals. Speaking of which, I actually got a prediction right this time. It was an easy one and one I didn’t care about it, which is why I haven’t mentioned it until now, but Just Dance 2018 got announced. Oh boy. That puts my current total at 2/12 correct. Check back later to see if I keep doing this poorly.