Theatrhythm Final Bar Line

(available for PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch, Switch version used for the review)

Theatrhythm Final Bar Line is the new entry in the franchise celebrating Square Enix Music through a music rhythm game. It also celebrates Final Fantasy’s 35th anniversary by creating a collection of songs that is massive and spread throughout the entire franchise’s history.

The game has moved from Nintendo DS to the bigger consoles, but has lost the touchscreen aspect; everything is now done using the trigger buttons, the A button in the Switch version and the analogue stick for directions. It’s a very basic rhythm game, you get more points depending on how on-beat the note you’re meant to be hitting lands, but in this case in the backdrop of several caricatures of various Final Fantasy characters that you unlock throughout the game and can level up to increase their strength and magic abilities as well as other stats. This will also be useful during online multiplayer when you are battling other people.

The battles are done in the background for the most part, and the speed at which you can defeat several opponents is dependent on how you level up your characters. Several abilities will come in handy, particularly ones that will help when you’re struggling with some songs. I recommend levelling up Prompto from FFXV since he comes with an ability that heals your party when you’re at 15% health. While you will have access to traditional FF items like potions etc, that ability will come in very useful when you’re playing some songs on hard difficulty.

The game doesn’t punish you if you want to play it on lower difficulties. It doesn’t lock any songs or characters behind certain difficulties. If you’re doing a series quest and want to lower the difficulty for one song, you absolutely can. That being said, there are many ways to unlock all of the songs. You can play series quests which see you play the songs in the order that they appear in the games, the backdrops often change for each of the songs depending on what the scenario in the game was.

If you’re like me and are a massive fan of Square Enix franchises and Final Fantasy, this game is a dream come true as it is a massive celebration of the music and franchises as a whole. It’s an absolutely excellent selection of songs and the gameplay is really good fun too.

PROS

• Gameplay

I already explained how the basic gameplay works, notes are hit using your choice of the left or right trigger buttons as well as either the D-pad or the A button depending on your console. You also have to occasionally hold a note which requires having another hand free to hit other notes simultaneously. You’ll gain a letter rank depending on how well you do on each song, from F being the weakest to A, the highest rank possible being SSS, which usually requires getting a perfect chain which requires missing no notes and hitting the notes on perfect beat. I only had a couple of SSS-ranked songs during my playthrough, the only major one I got was the theme of Final Fantasy 12.

The gameplay itself is a genuinely good single-player game. I lost a lot of time trying to improve my score with several of my favourite songs, and getting through all of the series quests was really good fun, especially because I was unlocking more and more characters along the way.

It was really nice rediscovering these games through the music. I don’t know how the game worked at launch and whether you could pick any series quest from the start since I purchased the demo version which only came with some music from FF2, 5, 7, 13, 14, and 15. It did save my progress when I started the main game but I wasn’t able to immediately go and play FF9 music like I wanted to (I’m a big FF9 fan and it has probably my favourite music in the entire series) since I had to complete other series quests before I coil unlock those. You won’t have to complete series quests all of the time in order to get more songs, you get a key to unlock another series every time you can beat 3 songs in a series quest, and you can immediately duck out of that series quest to start another one.

Series quests also add an extra level of challenge, for example, beating a song without using healing items or taking damage. It kind of varies but you can easily figure out how you’re going to achieve this since the challenge doesn’t vary depending on which difficulty you’re playing at.

It’s also not the only way to unlock songs, you can also just play songs on the music stage and when you’re done the game comes up with recommendations of other songs to play – if you see one with an exclamation mark, you can pick that song which is one that you haven’t played before and is random. If you beat that song without failing you will unlock it to play at any time.

On top of that, you will also unlock songs whilst playing multiplayer. When I played some multiplayer with my friend from America we ended up unlocking songs for each other by playing songs that the other one had picked. I got a lot of FF14 songs unlocked because my friend had played those during his playthrough.

The multiplayer is also excellent because it comes with several options, you can play with Mario Kart style items in the mix to even up the mix or you can see who gets the best score. You can also tell what the rooms are depending on difficulty and whether items are on and off. You’ll have to look out for rage-quitters closing the entire room; if the original host leaves the room it will automatically hand over to a new host to wait for other players. Multiplayer has been good fun, my only issue has been that some people duck out way too soon. I personally prefer playing the game with items on, since it won me a few games at the last minute.

Multiplayer functions really well, I’ve been playing with people in America and Japan and the game has run very smoothly, considering the type of game that this is it really needed to work.

• Song selection

I love the song selection in this game. Almost no game has been left unaccounted for, and some of the most obscure games are featured here! I never thought that Square Enix would include F|inal Fantasy Mystic Quest, but here we are. Almost all of the major songs from each game are featured. There are very few misses from each franchise. No matter what game you like, your favourite song should be here. I also like the fact that not only are there lots of songs here, but there’s lots of different remixes too. There are three versions of One-Winged Angel here: the original, the advent children version, and the one from the remake.

The remake being here actually surprised me considering that all of the songs are just remade versions from FF7.

What puzzles me slightly is some of the choices for songs that were included in the deluxe version. I get that you’d need to deal with licensing issues for some songs like Eyes on Me and Melodies of Life; but why is the Zanarkand Theme from FF10 locked behind a paywall? That’s just wrong considering how unimportant a song to FF10 is.

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• Completionism

If you want to go for 100% in this game it will mean that you have an excuse to play all of those songs all over again. You have to get all of the trading cards as well as all of the airships etc. Fortunately, there are no microtransactions in this game, which is brilliant. You can make up your mind about the summons considering that they come in different varieties, and I would not go out of your way to make a checklist of every single summon and every single rarity, if you’re going to 100%, just get one of each.

While you can do some series quests to get certain items, it’s mostly just random. This is particularly the case with trading cards. The most efficient way to get them is through the multiplayer since you get one after every single match- but if you want one in particular, the onus is on your opponents not picking the card before you, especially if you didn’t beat them in that song. For example, if I need the gold Vivi card for my collection and I didn’t come first in that song, it’s on the other person who beat me to not pick that card or else I have to wait for it to come around again.

The completionist aspect does give a good reason for replay, but the random aspect to it means that it might be a bit of a nightmare trying to go for 100%.

• Video Stages

The videos that you can unlock in this are cool and celebrate the history of Final Fantasy very well, and they replicate the team’s previous efforts with the Kingdom Hearts game Melody of Memories which used footage of Kingdom Hearts 3 as an overlay for the songs in that game since the Nintendo Switch wasn’t powerful enough to render models used in that game.

They did that for this game but most of the songs and videos for this game I found were ones that you could get in the gameplay normally. There’s nothing really wrong with the gameplay style used for this game, but you won’t really want to be playing a rhythm game while trying to watch a music video simultaneously. Fortunately, all of the videos are unlocked and are in the gallery, so you can view them at any time.

CONS

• Missing songs

I said that the song selection is great, and it is, especially considering that they will be adding more as DLC, we’ve already seen it on launch day as songs from Romancing Saga were added as well as Live a Live songs too, and songs from The World Ends With You coming down the line also, which you’ll get automatically on launch day if you’ve bought the premium version.

However, there are some missing songs which made me go, you’ve put this much effort into including these, why not go a little further? I wasn’t expecting some songs to show up here like the Florence and the Machine version of Stand By Me (which is the theme of Final Fantasy 15) since that would have been tied up in so much licencing that it wouldn’t have been worth it, but there are a few songs that I wish were here and I don’t think are going to show up in future updates. One of my favourite songs in FF9 is Eternal Harvest is missing, which really sucks.

There are also not many remixes or versions of the Chocobo theme, they included the FF2 version which, yes, for historical purposes it’s a great one to put in since it’s the first one, but it’s the worst version of the theme!

There are no songs from Chocobo GP which is one of the most recent spin-off games, which is very perplexing considering the game only came out only a year ago and they must still have that music lying around, plus it had some really good remixes!

I also don’t like the fact that the song selection is cut in half for online multiplayer. The game is split into battle songs and traversing songs. Traversing songs are not too different, the only difference is that at some point you’re going to be holding notes whilst moving the analogue stick up and down depending on the direction of how the note is taking you. All of those songs are cut from online multiplayer! If you want to play the Golden Saucer theme then too bad because it’s single-player only. If you paid a lot of money to get Melodies of Life in the deluxe version, too bad! Melodies of Life is a travel song and you won’t be able to play it.

The song selection is also bad for people with online multiplayer. For example, say you didn’t want to buy the deluxe version right now but your friend has. You can’t then play the songs that they have on that version, which means that if you want to hear Reel of Motion from FF10 you have to put in the money for the deluxe.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Theatrhythm Final Bar Line has some issues but man, did I enjoy it. This has been one of my favourite rhythm games that I have enjoyed in recent memory, the gameplay is excellent and I love the selection of music that it brings. I wish that the song selection wasn’t cut in half for online multiplayer, and it’s a little too random with its collectables.

Despite the fact that it isn’t the best-looking game, it’s a game that I enjoyed playing. I didn’t talk about the art style but I think that the puppet-like versions of the characters have a real charm to them. If you love Final Fantasy, you owe it to yourself to get this game. It’s only going to get better as the year goes on. This is a game where I nearly missed stops on my train journeys because I was so into it, and I think this will be another one of my general relaxing games for my downtime.

Final Score: 9.1/10

Hi-Fi Rush

(available for Xbox Series X & S, and PC. Xbox Series X version used for this review)

Hi-Fi Rush was not a game that I had on my review schedule, mainly because up until the latest Xbox Developer Direct at the end of January we didn’t even know this game existed. It wasn’t one of the listed games to be featured in the show, but at the beginning of the show, the presentation made it clear that there would be a surprise announcement from Tango Gameworks, the team behind games like The Evil Within and Ghostwire Tokyo.

What we got is really different, despite the fact that it has the same director and a lot of the same team as Ghostwire Tokyo, Hi-Fi Rush is a cartoony rhythm action game. The best way to describe it is it has the combat of Bayonetta and Devil May Cry with the look of games like Viewtiful Joe and Jet Set Radio, as well as the rhythm aspect of Rhythm Hellsinger and Crypt of the Necrodancer.

The game basically centres around a kid named Chai, who wants to be a future rockstar, and moves to a campus where he undergoes a procedure to get robotic prosthetics. In doing so, the procedure goes wrong and his music player gets embedded into his chest so he starts learning the beat of the world. Now being hunted by the corporation that runs the campuses robots, he teams up with a hacker named Peppermint and a cat named 808, along with a few other rebels to take down the corporation, one board member at a time. Each board member kind of serves as a boss fight, and there’s a lot of them to do, but they have a lot of variety to them.

The game itself is designed to be very accommodating, the game gives you several methods in which to play it- they do not want to push anyone out. I’ll go into the accessibility options later on, but I’ll just say that do not turn away from this game just because it’s a rhythm game.

Now, shadow-dropping a game after a presentation that’s going to be an Xbox exclusive on consoles is a bold move, but has it paid off for Microsoft?

PROS

• Combat

Combat is a bit more simplistic than something like Bayonetta, but the same basic features are there. A for jumps, X for light attacks, Y for heavy attacks, and B for parrying – which is used for summoning your support members to aid you in battles, as well as dodging. You’ll want to hit the beat because you will gain extra power behind your attacks depending on how well you match the beat, as well as how well you can jump and dodge – there are bonuses you can get later on in the game for counterattacks for perfect timed parries and dodges.

If you think that rhythm games aren’t for you, don’t panic, you only get bonuses for performing to the beat, and this game won’t punish you for being off beat. If you’re worried about not being able to hear the music timing, almost every aspect of the environment also performs to the beat. You’ll see lights on computer screens, and even the way steam moves out of vents is to the beat – and if that’s not enough, the robot cat 808 also emits lights to the beat, so all of this can aid in your attack abilities.

If you’re used to games like Crypt of the Necrodancer, you can press a button on the controller to bring up a beat tracker which will give you an extra visual aid. I turned this on on occasion. But at times when I needed to do the perfect parries, I would turn it off. This game is incredibly accessible for anyone who wants to play.

The combat is also very in-depth if you want it to be. The second that you finish the first mission a shop opens that allows you to buy more combos, as well as things like guitar chips which activate extra abilities and some other special attacks. You’ll want to take your support characters with you to increase their abilities since they will aid you greatly too. Each one is useful for certain situations, for example, Peppermint has a pair of guns that can break barriers, whereas Macaron enables a heavy attack which can destroy more brute-force shields.

In short, the combat is excellent, and I really can’t find a fault in it. If you really like games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta, this game is definitely one you need to check out.

• Graphics & Animation

Hi-Fi Rush runs at a very good 60 frames per second during the gameplay, but the way that the animations have been done is excellent! The game moves seamlessly between the two. I made a lot of comparisons with games like Viewtiful Joe and Jetset Radio, (and to a lesser extent Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker), and this is mainly because it emulates the cell shading style that those games go for. The difference is that this game allows for some incredibly expressive characters. Seriously, this is one of the best-looking games on the Xbox Series X right now, and I say with absolute certainty that it will stay that way for quite a long time, even with big hitters like Redfall and Starfield coming out later this year- the only game I can see challenging it anytime soon will be the upcoming Hellblade 2.

The animation style is really interesting. Anime has clearly played a big part, and I’ll talk about that more when I talk about the narrative of the game, but Hi-Fi Rush looks like something that could appear on Toonami. It also helps that the character designs are fantastic! When you have one of the bosses existing only to make Jojo references, you know that something has gone right in the development process.

• Story and Humour

The story behind the game is really about fighting corporate greed, and the game has some excellent villains, Kale Vandelay, who I was surprised to find was voiced by Roger Craig Smith, the current voice of Sonic the Hedgehog in the video games – which is surprising considering he sounds really different in this role! It proved to me what a versatile voice actor he is.

I already mentioned that anime was a big influence, and it’s because this game clearly takes inspiration from studios like Trigger and Gynax and other 90’s Animes, as well as Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. It definitely reminded me of Fooly Cooly as well.

While the story isn’t anything ground-breaking, it’s still enjoyable because of the character interactions between all of the various on-screen personalities. It also helps that Chai is a likeable protagonist and that the writing is actually really funny at times, aided once again by the expressive animation. The dialogue is written well too, and I thought that it was so enjoyable.

• Soundtrack

Obviously, the soundtrack is incredibly important if you’re playing a game like this. The music that has been composed for the game is once again excellent.

There are licensed songs, but most of the soundtrack has been produced by Tango Gamework’s in-house sound designer, Masatoshi Yanagi. The music that he has composed is really good! It’s easy to keep to the beat and it is enjoyable to listen to. Some of the songs do come off as a bit samey, but as a whole, it’s a really good soundtrack, and he should really be commended for it.

The licensed songs also have a great selection, featuring songs by artists like The Black Keys, The Flaming Lips, and The Joy Formidable, but particularly 9 Inch Nails plays a part by having 2 songs on the soundtrack. They’re mostly reserved for particular sequences or boss fights, and a particular highlight for me was when the song ‘Invaders Must Die’ by the Prodigy played, which really marked one of the big heights of the game. I won’t spoil why it happens, but it was really good!

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• Level length

For the most part, the levels are a good length. The game is around ten hours from start to finish, and most levels won’t go over an hour. Later levels, however, go on quite a bit longer. If you’re playing on your first playthrough and don’t have access to the hideouts, there are times that you won’t get a break in story mode. There are times when I stayed up a bit later than usual, and I’ll say that thankfully Xbox Series X has a quick resume that you might want to take advantage of.

• Boss fights

I mentioned that the boss fights are pretty good, and they are- they’re real highlights of the game and they often introduce new parts of the game so none of them feel stale. There are two towards the end including the final boss where I feel like the difficulty spiked too much and I was really tempted to turn the difficulty down both times. I didn’t end up doing so in the end, but I will say that there’s no shame in doing so since they are really difficult. The game will eventually give you the option to go back and redo levels since some levels are inaccessible on your first playthrough and require a character that you picked up after it, but this is only unlocked post-game. If you want to try it again later on, you absolutely can.

CONS

• Latency Issue

I didn’t personally experience this, but I’m making a note of it since a few other reviewers did. It’s pretty easily fixed, though. The game will advise you, in the beginning, to turn your computer or monitor to Game Mode, which I really recommend doing so that you don’t have any latency issues when trying to match the beats. I also read a few issues that when people were using a capture card to get the footage they had trouble with this also. These are minor issues that can easily be worked around.

I would advise you to play the game with headphones, since not only does it help you play the game better, but it would make up for any minor issues if they arise. The capture card aspect will only affect people who want to stream the game to Twitch, in case you’re worried about the licenced music, don’t worry, there is a Streamer Mode available in the game that changes the music so that you won’t get a strike.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Hi-Fi Rush is a fantastic game and a brilliant new IP for Microsoft to have for the Xbox. Tango GameWorks has created a brilliant passion project that really puts all of their love on screen and I’m all for it. The combat is excellent, the art and animation are fantastic, and the game overall is just a joy to play. This is already a Game of the Year contender in my opinion. It’s only available digitally right now, and I would really recommend picking it up on the Steam Deck or on Xbox. The game is half-price from a full retail-priced game and if you have an Xbox Game Pass it is included as part of your subscription. Please pick it up because I really want this to be turned into a franchise going forward.

Final Score: 9.5/10

Blanc

(available for Nintendo Switch and PC, Switch version used for the review)

Blanc is a small game made by the French studio Casus Ludi and has been published by Gearbox Entertainment. It’s a game that I’ve had my eye on for a while because of the concept: it’s a game where you are in control of a wolf cub and a deer fawn as they work together to travel a snowy landscape to reunite with their families. The game shows them working together to get through the landscape, solving various puzzles.

I wouldn’t describe Blanc as a puzzle game per se, it’s more of an experience or a journey.

The game offers both offline and online co-op, and although the game was advertised as two-player only, you can play it solo.

Blanc is obviously a much smaller title but it has really lofty ambitions, and it clearly caught the attention of Gearbox Entertainment as they decided to publish it. I have to say that Blanc is a game that you should only play if you have a friend over or if you can speak to someone online. Don’t think that you can just pair up with a random person either, the Switch version required your partner to be on your friend list. Since none of my friends have purchased this game, I had to play it solo. For the purposes of this review, I wanted to see how this game would work connected to the second controller, and I will comment on my thoughts on that.

PROS

• Art Style

Right off the bat, Blanc is a very good-looking game. It was a very bold decision for the game to be in black and white, but both thematically and visually it’s appropriate and amazing. It also is a lot easier to distinguish the environment than I thought it was going to be. They do a great job making snowy landscapes look beautiful and treacherous at the same time, and the game reflects the French countryside very well.

• Co-op Controls

When you play this game in co-op, the controls are good. I will stress that I couldn’t find a person to play co-op with me, but I can already tell from the minimal time where I used two controllers instead of one that the game was made with co-op in mind. While it is possible to play the game solo, please don’t play it like that!

It’s very accommodating no matter who plays the game, you only use the left analogue stick and the left two triggers. Communication with your partners is important for solving the puzzles but it’s not a game which requires a lot of timing to be accurate – it’s more concerned about the positioning of the characters. The deer can only do certain things that the wolf can’t do, and vice versa.

The gameplay, when done well, really aids the experience of the game.

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• Storyline

The storyline is pretty good for the most part, it’s a pretty typical enemies-become-friends plot, but for the most part, it works out quite well. It feels to me like an independent animated film that you would see at a film festival, particularly with the black-and-white aesthetic. The team made the wise decision to not have any dialogue in the game, it’s all told through the animal’s expressions.

One of the highlights of the game for me was when the deer and the wolf came across two goat kids, each one mimicking either the deer or the wolf, which led to some of the better puzzles in the game, as well as one of the most heart-in-your-throat moments of the story.

I will say, just when I thought that the story was going somewhere, it just kind of stopped. It doesn’t feel like the most satisfying conclusion in the world, and it kind of gave me a feeling of ‘Well, that’s done then.’ This leads me to my next point.

• Game Length

This game can be beaten in about an hour and a half at most. If you’re adept at the puzzles you can probably beat it in under an hour. The game is designed that way on purpose because it’s designed to be an experience, and this is probably good because when you have a friend over you maybe don’t want to play this over multiple sessions. Still, I wish it was a bit longer. I feel like if I was playing this with a friend we would both want it to go on for longer. Granted, for reasons that I’ll go into, I didn’t enjoy the game in single-player, but this game still feels too short nonetheless.

CONS

• Single player controls

Blanc is functional, but I did not enjoy playing this game in a single-player. You have the same controls as co-op, but when you’re playing solo, you have to control the other animal at the exact same time as the other controller. It reminds me of trying to pat your head and rub your belly, which was really difficult to get a hang of. There were a lot of moments where I had to stop and regain my bearings to control the game. It is really taxing on your hands! They were kind of sore by the end of it because of how much effort I was putting into memorising how I’m supposed to move my hands to control both characters – and they often wouldn’t go where I needed them to. Only get this game if you have a friend you can play it with because single-player is rubbish to control.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Blanc is a very ambitious project and it does look great, but it’s a little too short for my liking and it’s terrible to play in single-player. If you can play co-op it’s a really good experience for the first time but it won’t have much replay value. It’s another example of a game with a great idea but is let down because it forces co-op.

Final Score: 6.8/10

Fire Emblem: Engage

(available only for Nintendo Switch)

Fire Emblem Engage is the latest in the Fire Emblem series and the second one to feature on Nintendo Switch, following on from the previous entry, Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Don’t feel as though you have to play that one to play this, as usual, it’s not a direct sequel. In fact, Engage has been speculated that it was an anniversary game. It hasn’t been confirmed by Nintendo themselves, but reliable sources say that Nintendo has had this game finished for at least a year before they released it. If that’s true, it’s likely that finding a release space was a bit tricky for them since they missed the anniversary.

Fire Emblem Engage is trying to honour the history of the series. It was confirmed early on that the game will feature a lot of returning characters from previous entries, going from the first game up until the most recent release with Three Houses.

This review will be taking a lot of comparisons with Three Houses, not only because it’s the most recent Fire Emblem game that I have played but because it is the only other one developed with the Switch in mind. It’s also the only other one that you can buy now because the port of the original is no longer available in the E-Shop.

Like previous entries, this one is a tactical RPG and this time puts you in the role of Alear, a champion known as the Divine Dragon who has been asleep for a thousand years following a war to stop the evil Fell Dragon. The story involves the Divine Dragon waking up, forming a new army, and working to free the land with the aid of the nobles of the Four Kingdoms.

For me, this was a game that I was excited about. Three Houses is one of my favourite Switch games, and this one looked like it would have a lot of the same qualities but would only require one full playthrough to get the whole story. While that is true, I feel like one of my major concerns with this game was that it should have been positioned as an anniversary celebration for the series but was instead positioned as the next main entry. And in that sense, I have a few issues with the game. That’s not to say that the game is bad- far from it- this is a really good Fire Emblem game in most regards, but when it falters, it’s really noticeable. The main issues that I have with the game are more narrative concerns, so if you’re just in it for the gameplay, it won’t be an issue, but I’ll get to that.

PROS

• Gameplay

The gameplay is actually really good in Engage. The mechanics are still here, you’re moving characters on a grid board, positioning for different fights to get good chain attacks and take advantage of weaknesses, you get the idea. If you’ve played a previous Fire Emblem game, this will be very familiar to you.

Not much is different here, but it all feels very refined. The Rock, Paper, Scissors mechanic has been brought back into the game, this is most notable from the start when it’s positioned in the Main Menu of every battle. Sword is strong against Axe, Axe is strong against Spear, and Spear is strong against Sword. There are a few other weapons that create variants, but that’s the main one that you are introduced to first. You’ll want to memorise that because you’ll be breaking enemies by hitting them with their weaknesses, preventing them from doing a counterattack. Believe me, that will come in handy.

The biggest new mechanic for this is the Engage mechanic. It’s one of several rings that are possessed by the Emblems (which basically act as Souls) of 12 of the Fire Emblem protagonists. The number has gone up in the time that I’ve purchased the DLC expansion pass since two of the waves have been released already, a third one featuring two more characters is due out later this year and a fourth one with a new story is also coming down the line.

The biggest strength of the game is the Emblems, they really do benefit you. A particular point about the DLC that I’ll come back to later, but so far the spirits that you get in that one have also been quite handy. The first wave included Tiki from the first Fire Emblem, and once you get her you can make a character frankly broken, you’ll also get the three house leaders from Three Houses sharing one bracelet. That’s the only big difference between them- the DLC Emblems come in bracelets rather than rings.

They initially provide Stat Boosts, but they also provide you with special attacks and legendary weapons when you Engage with them, though you can only be engaged for three turns. You’ll want to pick your time wisely with this since once it’s gone, you’ll need to recharge. I like this mechanic because it allows you to make up for a character’s weaknesses or improve on their strengths, depending on how you want to play the game and which emblems you want to equip to which character. For example, Alear is a swordfighter by default so I mainly stuck him with Sword Emblems like Marth and Roy to take advantage of his strengths. You can also get Micaiah from another game and she can be very useful because she can add an extra healer to your party for free. Considering that the game only has three dedicated healer characters, this can come in very handy.

Adding this mechanic to the game it adds another dimension to the gameplay, and if you’re not that familiar with your Fire Emblem history, you don’t need to read up on many of the characters, it’s mostly the characters that appear in Smash Brothers. Only two of the Smash Brother’s Fire Emblem characters aren’t in the game but are confirmed to be in the next wave of DLC.

• Graphics

Fire Emblem Engage looks really good, and it feels like a step up from Three Houses. Nothing against Three Houses, I think that that game looked really good, but it gives off the impression of a HD 3DS game rather than a game that was made entirely with the Switch in mind, this is particularly true with the cutscenes, which really varied in quality.

This game looks really good and was definitely built with the Switch in mind. I know some people complained about the character designs, particularly Alear, who has had a lot of jokes made about his resemblance to VTubers and his blue and red hair meaning he has been called the Pepsi Protagonist. But as a whole, I really like the designs. The nobles, for example, are real highlights and they feel like they have been improved.

There’s a lot more variety this time around in terms of gameplay and design compared to Three Houses which definitely felt like the maps were starting to get a bit samey after a point.

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• Story

All I can say is that you’re going to stick with the story even if you tuned out. The storyline in Engage is very one-note when it starts, which isn’t untrue of Three Houses, which I thought had one of the best storylines in the series, but despite the fact that the story does pick up later on and does add dimension (particularly with the mysterious girl and Alear’s relationship), but as a whole, it doesn’t feel it has the substance that Three Houses did, which felt like a tragedy that you wanted to prevent.

In the case of Engage, it doesn’t quite reach those heights. In fact, if there’s something I think that this game does very well, it’s villains. They are probably some of the best parts of the final act.

There’s also the fact of the individual relationships between the various characters. As usual, you can improve their bond rank by making them fight alongside each other on the battlefield or do tasks together in the hub world, this time they can have a meal together, work in the orchard or stables, or have a swim in the pool. You are going to have to do a combination of all of these things to up the relationship. Let’s just say that this doesn’t really feel like a focus this time around.

But man, I kind of think that Engage is a bit of a weaker story, especially in recent memory since it’s coming off the heels of Awakening and Three Houses. I know Awakening was quite a while ago but it still feels very recent. Not all of the stories have hit, Fire Emblem Echoes is an example, but this one didn’t start to hit the right notes until the end portion.

• Side Content

The side content is fine in this one, but it doesn’t feel like it has that much interest this time around. You get a few mini-games, like a dragon riding game or the training exercises, which are perfectly fine, but they kind of felt unnecessary and I barely did them after the first few chapters.

The game does add the arena back in which is great considering that you can spend bond points in various ways, like using it to up the bond between certain characters and the emblems, which you want to do because then you can use points from various battles to give characters extra skills- for example, Marth can give you extra sword proficiency.

The biggest waste of bond points is the extra rings, this is where the gacha mechanics come into the game. You basically get special rings of various characters that don’t have EMblems in the game and you can meld multiple repeats to get upgrades. I didn’t really bother with this one, since once you get most of the Emblem Rings, it becomes pointless.

CONS

• Relationships with little substance

I think back to all of the various back-and-forths the characters had in Three Houses and how good they were because Engage doesn’t really have that, I don’t feel like there’s much substantial character growth with these interactions. There are some good ones in here, Alear and Ivy get a good subplot, but the rest are few and far between. None of them reaches the height of substance like anything that Three Houses gave you, and as a result, it feels like your bond with the characters isn’t quite there.

In Three Houses, I really worked hard to get all of the character’s relationships maxed by the end of the game. It also doesn’t help that it’s made even more pointless by the fact that there are not many restrictions on giving out gifts and the time it takes to do stuff, particularly considering you’re not running by the calendar. As a result, it meant that the whole bond between the characters felt rather hollow, especially since the romance options feel really unsubstantial this time.

• Amiibo Functionality

The amiibos work fine, it works for all of the Smash Brother and Fire Emblem ones, and it’s fine that you just get some music and costumes. But I think that there’s something wrong with them- when I used it, they just didn’t register. I registered the amiibo’s usage, but the tickets that I got for the music and clothes didn’t appear, so I was out of luck. This is something that I think they need to fix.

• It’s a bit too easy!

This might be down to the fact that I did a lot of side content so I was probably over-levelling my characters, but wow I really didn’t need to bother! As long as you’re using one character most of the time, they will do pretty well in battle. I should also stress that I was playing the game in normal difficulty, so I probably would have had more of a challenge playing in harder difficulty- but this wasn’t something that I could do. While you can change the difficulty to make it lower during your playthrough, you can’t make it higher. If you want to make the game harder, you have to start from scratch.

I also felt like the game wasn’t challenging me that much. I rarely had to upgrade weapons, and I didn’t really have to think about conserving money due to the fact that the game just gives out a ton of money towards the end, it was only in the middle that I had trouble raising funds. Weapons don’t have durability anymore, so they don’t break, so the only thing that you have to watch out for is the staffs that you use for healing and various other magic. Other spells that are in books also don’t have durability issues, so you can use them as much as you want.

If you want a more difficult Fire Emblem, you’ll have to pick the harder settings at the start. This one really didn’t challenge me, and it didn’t help that the Time Rewind mechanic from the last game is back and it didn’t have a limit on its uses.

I may have had a bit of trouble if permadeath was on, and I definitely didn’t want any characters to die, but right now, I would say that the game was too easy.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Fire Emblem: Engage is a pretty good game and I really enjoyed my time with ti, but I felt that it was a bit too easy and was lacking the substance that I enjoyed from Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

That being said, when the game hit, it hit really well. I think that this is a great celebratory game to the series, but I think that positioning it as the next main entry exposes some of the weaker parts of the game a lot more than if it was a companion piece. I think that will be quite noticeable if the rumoured remake of Genealogy of the Holy War turns out to be true.

Final Score: 8.4/10

A Space for the Unbound

(available on Playstation 4 & 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch and PC. Nintendo Switch version used for this review)

A Space for the Unbound is a game developed by the Indonesian studio Mojiken; this is their latest of four games. I first became aware of it in a Nintendo Direct and picked it up as one of my first purchases of the year, seeing the potential it had. It’s basically a 2D narrative game set in the 90s in a small Indonesian town and is the story of a young high school couple, Atma and Raya. The goal is initially to fulfil their bucket list, it’s basically a way to facilitate some of the mission structures and collectables. For example, some of the collectables include getting all of the bottle caps and petting and naming every cat in town. You’re going to need to fulfil all of the items on the bucket list to unlock the true ending, though it doesn’t add too much, so I would say there’s no shame in looking it up on Youtube as it only adds a minute or so onto the ending.

The game really revolves around puzzle solving as well as narrative structure. If there’s one game it really reminded me of, it’s the Life is Strange game, particularly because of the fact that it is revealed early on that Raya and Atma have powers. Raya’s powers are a little less defined and I won’t go into too much detail on them since it’s crucial to the plot, but Atma is able to delve into people’s minds, which is used to help solve people’s problems throughout the town.

The other portions of the game are a lot of fetch quests and puzzle solving.

The game’s map is relatively small, so the fetch quests don’t take too long. The game isn’t too long at all, it has seven chapters in total, but really it’s more like 5 since the prologue and epilogue are quite short. You can get the game done in around 12 hours. I would say those 12 hours are worth it considering how well the game does its narrative structure. The gameplay shifts every so often, usually as homages to games that the developers clearly grew up loving- while Life is Strange is definitely there, there are also homages to Street Fighter 2 with the quick-time event button pushing game, and there’s even a chapter that replicates Phoenix Wright in many ways.

But overall, how does the game pan out?

PROS

• Story

I won’t go into too much detail since I think that A Space for the Unbound is something that you should experience for yourself, but the game does a very good job of giving you a cosy environment only to then provide a threat to that environment and making you want to return it to normal. It does a really good job of making you fall in love with all of the characters and the setting, and I really enjoyed my time with the narrative.

It introduces quite a few characters but it felt like each chapter of the game is where we get more time for individual characters, so it doesn’t feel like they’re all competing for screen time.

What’s more, the conclusion is fantastic. The content warning you get at the beginning does kind of give away what some of the plot elements are going to be, so you’ll probably see some elements of the story coming. But it still managed to surprise me in a lot of ways. Though, I did see the major plot twist coming.

That being said, even with a good idea of what the plot twist was going to be, it didn’t spoil my enjoyment! The game does an excellent job of building up to what is an excellent climax.

• Puzzles

The puzzles in this game actually don’t suck. I’m not a fan of forced puzzle elements in games, but this time the game is actually built around them. They’re really not difficult until towards the end of the game, and I only had to look up what I was doing wrong twice in my 12-hour playthrough, and they were both towards the end of the game- and even then, I felt a bit foolish since the answers were obvious.

They also do a good job of weaving these puzzles into the plotline itself. None of them are too cryptic for the most part. I do think a couple of them at the end spoilt that, but I didn’t put this in the mixed section because I think that they are a minor blemish on what are really good and well-thought-out puzzles.

• Graphics and Art style

Because it’s set in the 90s, the team has gone for a 16-bit look to match the time period, and it actually works really well. The team managed to get an excellent and rather unique pixel art style that suits the setting well, and one of the things I found amazing was that they used this to give the characters very expressive movements and facial expressions.

What’s more, the character design is really good and manages to make the characters look really distinctive.

The weirdest factor for me was that it was able to do this in such a short period of time. The fact that most of the characters are only on screen for their respective chapters where they get most of their character development means that the team had to do a very good job of making them stand out. I can only think of one character that gets multiple arcs and it was actually one of my favourite parts of the game since it ties into how helping someone out in a previous chapter actually causes more problems than it solves. It really did help you think about your actions.

MIXED

• Collectables

I liked most of the collectables in the game considering that they’re not too hard to spot, bottle caps are easy to get since you can see them glowing on the ground, and you can actually keep track of them in your journal so you can see which ones are missing. I get the feeling that some of them are tied to certain chapters since I didn’t end up getting all of them in my playthrough and I went through most of the map in every chapter, so clearly, there are a few hidden ones.

The biggest issue I had was with the cats. Not because it’s a bad collectable, I’m pretty sure I got most of them and I did enjoy naming each one, but despite my efforts, I don’t think the game makes it clear how many cats you have to find, and I think that actually is annoying.

I did enjoy most of the collectables in the game but some of them were a little too hidden for my liking and I don’t think that the game did a good job implementing a tracking system for one of the collectables.

CONS

• Kind of drags towards the end

The plotline never really dies down, it kept me intrigued for most of the runtime- but I felt around Chapter Four that there was a lot more of ‘do this to get this which will then lead to this’, which I felt was just there to pad out the runtime. It certainly didn’t help that some of the puzzles that I had to solve in one of the later chapters involved a second element of Atma’s powers that don’t get introduced until that chapter which makes some puzzles take a lot longer than they probably need to.

The quick time events that they use for the fights and another gameplay element that I won’t spoil aren’t too difficult, and you’ll get the hang of them quite quickly since they’re meant to be implemented like a slowed-down of Street Fighter 2 combos. But there were points towards the end of the game where I was thinking ‘can we just move on because I’ve been here for quite a while’.

• Tying the True Ending to Collectables

I could be wrong, but I believe that getting the true ending was down to filling out the bucket list- most of the guides that I found did say that filling out the bucket list is required to get the true ending. Considering how cryptic the locations are of some of the collectables, it feels to me like an ending that critical should not be tied to it.

You don’t really need to unlock the true ending to get the full story, but it does lead to a really excellent moment that you would miss out on without completing that bucket list. It’s a minor point but I felt it was worth mentioning.

FINAL THOUGHTS

A Space for the Unbound is an excellent narrative adventure, and I really enjoyed my time with it, and I think that in spite of some of the game dragging a little bit and I didn’t like the fact that the true ending was tied so heavily to the collectables- but I think that the ending that you get without even completing the bucket list is still excellent and obviously you can look up a guide on how to do it, so if you just want to get that, just play the game as you normally would and then look it up later.

I would really recommend playing this one, especially if you like Life is Strange since this game has some similarities. I would say that if you don’t like Life is Strange but you like the concept of those games, this is one to give a go since it does cut out some of the weaker elements of those games, particularly the cringy dialogue which has a very ‘How do you do, fellow kids?’ vibe to it.

If you didn’t like narrative-driven games before, this one probably won’t change your mind, but I would urge you to give it a go since this is a very heartfelt passion project from a small studio. This one is definitely worth a shot though I would say be aware that you can’t affect the plot too much so there’s not much replay value (though the price does reflect that).

FINAL SCORE: 9.1/10

Sports Story

(available on Nintendo Switch only)

Sports Story is the latest game from Sidebar Games and is created to be a follow-up to the company’s previous entry, Golf Story, an RPG centred around a golf player. While Sports Story does have golf, it also includes other sports like tennis, BMX, football, cricket, and even some odd choices like fishing!

If you liked Golf Story, you have probably already picked this one up. I recommend playing Golf Story prior to this one since it still holds up remarkably well even if the RPG side is a little confusing in terms of how stat points are assigned.

That being said, Sports Story is still a sequel for the most part. You’re going to be playing golf more than any other sport in the game, and most of the sports play rather similarly. The mechanics of the game haven’t really been changed. It’s a lot of single-button taps to align shots and power. The game does take you through the other sports rather well, most of the areas are kind of assigned to a certain sport. For example, the boarding school area on the island that the company PureStrike has brought you to is designed for tennis, there’s an underground mining area called Britannia that is made for the cricket section, and Pelican Falls is used to introduce fishing. I will say, most of Golf Story’s charm is still intact here. It’s a very wacky and comedic storyline!

Honestly, I think that this game actually improves on the first, though I’m aware that I’m in the minority – most people have declared this game a disappointment. If you expect me to disagree, this review might not be for you. That’s not to say that I’ll be ignoring the negative points, I do have negative comments to say – but my score at the end of this will be based on my enjoyment of the game as a whole rather than from a technical standpoint.

I feel like the negatives people feel about Sports Story come from people ignoring the problems that were in the first one also, which is something I definitely noticed with the reception of the game.

PROS

• Art Style

I like the art style of Golf Story, but I think that Sports Story is a massive improvement. I should say that I spent the majority of this game playing with my younger cousin over the Christmas period, so we often bounced off each other with opinions of the game and the one conclusion that we came to was that the game looks a lot better than the first one. Sports Story feels like it has really refined the engine that it was working on.

This won’t blow anyone’s mind, but I actually feel that the refinement of the engine allowed for the improvement of the environments and models. If you showed me Golf Story and told me that it was an old Super Nintendo game that had been dug up and rereleased, I would have maybe believed you, but Sports Story feels like there are a few elements to it that only modern games can create.

• Soundtrack

I don’t know why some people are upset with the soundtrack, I thought that it was excellent! There are no major highlights, but it creates a really nice atmosphere. I personally think that it’s a very good soundtrack – it’s a nice laid-back one that you might expect from a slice-of-life anime. I can see why some people have had an issue with the soundtrack, but I don’t agree with it.

MIXED

• Gameplay

For the most part, the gameplay is excellent. I know people have been a bit bothered with the number of fetch quests and it definitely got annoying towards the end of the game, but I personally felt that this game did a better job indicating what exactly you were meant to be doing compared to Golf Story. That being said, the game isn’t good at indicating where you’re meant to be going and seriously lacked a map function. It often feels like you only completed a mission because you happened to talk to a random NPC.

I think because the environments are way more interesting this time I didn’t feel too bothered when I had to explore these areas, and there weren’t too many unfair challenges either.

Most of the sports were played very well, golf was really good, cricket plays quite well, and I really liked the fishing once I got the hang out of it. However, it is still a sequel to Golf Story, so you’ll be playing golf most of the time.

Some of them haven’t been as well thought out: I still haven’t got the hang of the BMX and it resulted in the most frustrating side mission in the game. My advice: I don’t care how many side quests you need to do to raise the rank of your sports license (which the game makes it seem to be optional but you do need an S rank to do the final challenge), it’s not worth it for that challenge. The BMX challenge on Pelican Falls was such a nightmare and it took me over an hour and a half to finish it! I am not joking! Despite the fact that it has a time limit on it, you need to do it perfectly in one go or you fail, and this is the second BMX challenge that you will do in the whole game but it plays like it’s an end game challenge. The BMX as a whole feels like it has the wonkiest controls of all. The challenges are either too easy or too hard, there’s no middle.

Some of the sports don’t feel completely thought out. Tennis, for example… If other people have figured out how to aim their ball instead of just flinging it, then I would like to know how because it felt like some of the tennis matches that I won were out of luck instead of skill. It doesn’t help that a big portion of the game and one of the big side quests is entirely centred around tennis.

Tennis is pretty good and for the most part, the sports work out. I found it interesting that most of the sports don’t get given a decent part in the game. Volleyball is so absent from the game that when it shows up in the final challenge they even make a joke about the fact that it’s been missing from a lot of the game. Football isn’t really in this game much either. To such an extent I forgot to buy football shoes from the mall and was locked out from a side quest later on in the game because I didn’t even realise I had to buy some. And baseball is also incredibly absent- it only shows up for one arcade game in the mall and one side mission later which is also an annoyance because you can’t buy a baseball bat from the mall because the company says it doesn’t qualify as a proper sport- I’m not joking, that’s the actual dialogue!

Sports Story does have its annoying moments, but I think that they were a lot less frequent than Golf Story, where I spent a lot of time meandering around trying to figure out what to do. While Sports Story has less moments of frustration, when it frustrates me, it frustrates me a lot! That being said, I really appreciated the dungeon-crawling aspect of the game, and that’s where I had the most fun with it.

It feels like this one has a better balance between the RPG elements and the sport. The RPG elements have been significantly simplified, and I think that that was for the better. You only have three stats this time, Controls, Strike, and Power, and the game usually automatically ups a particular stat with levels. You only have a few occasions where you pick what stats you want to increase. I know some people didn’t like this aspect but I personally preferred this because I felt that simplifying it was a real benefit, considering that this game has to manage several different sports. I also didn’t like that in Golf Story I wasn’t exactly sure how to balance my stats in that game especially considering that any that I increase would cause another to decrease.

Overall, I think that the gameplay in Sports Story is really good but it does have some frustrating moments throughout and includes some ideas that were half-baked. I get a sense that there were more ideas that had to be left on the table because of time and budget issues, despite the fact that the game had quite a delay.

• Story

For the most part, this game has an improvement in the story compared to the first. There’s a more central part this time and it keeps most of the parts from Golf Story that worked quite well like the quirky characters and humorous storyline. You’ll certainly be seeing a lot more out-there story beats this time, which I think benefits the game. I really appreciate the narrative for the most part.

Where it fails is that it is lacking in some areas. This is another time where I feel like parts had to be left on the table because of time or budget. For example, one of the more significant side quests which has a lot going on with it kind of just ends abruptly. I felt like there was more in mind for what was going to happen there but the team couldn’t get it in.

There are also a couple of areas that just weren’t accessible in my playthrough, but I might have missed some elements in order to unlock them… But that being said, I did most if not all of the side quests in the game!

Then we come to the end. If this game has multiple endings that’s good because the ending I got was very anti-climactic. But I think that they’re maybe setting up for future releases.

CONS

• Performance

I haven’t experienced some of the worst performance issues, but I have experienced some bad ones. I initially thought that it was a bit of an exaggeration on the issues when I was playing the game for the first half, but when I got to the second half it became apparent that this game has serious issues. I’ve had this game crash on me on multiple occasions and I’ve also been in environments where I’ve soft-locked or had visual glitches which forced me to restart the game, which usually works since the game has a good recovery on it’s autosaves. I was still hitting the save button more than usual for fear of a crash.

There are also some framerate issues but they didn’t affect me too badly and I wouldn’t have noticed them if other people hadn’t pointed them out.

Sidebar Games have promised to patch the game, and after that point, I suspect most of the issues will be solved.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Sports Story is pretty good in my opinion, but I think that it needed more content to flesh it out and it needed to focus on a few extra areas. It does have performance issues but I would be lying if I said I thought that this game was worse than Golf Story, I actually think that this is a better game overall and it looks and plays great. I would maybe advise waiting until another patch is out to play this game, but as of right now, it is a good game it just has some issues that need to be fixed. I would even appreciate this game getting some DLC to act as an epilogue to give more story to the game, though I might have missed something because I didn’t do much of the post-game- but I actually didn’t spot anything that suggested there was much to a post-game.

My final score is more based on my enjoyment versus my frustration.

FINAL SCORE: 8.1/10

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet

(available for Nintendo Switch only)

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is now the ninth generation of Pokémon and has come out less than a year after the real change of pace that Pokémon Legends Arceus brought to the formula. I thought Legends Arceus was a good idea for a future spinoff series, but I wasn’t entirely on board with it. For one thing, I missed the PvP aspects of the trainer battles, but I felt that it was an excellent space to build on!

Pokémon’s 9th generation offers something that hasn’t been brought up until now: an entirely interconnected open world, where you can go anywhere and do anything.

For the purposes of this review, I played Pokémon Scarlet and picked Sprigatito as my starter. I haven’t done any other playthroughs, though I do own a copy of Violet, where I intend to start a challenge playthrough in Springtime once Pokémon Bank support is provided.

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet have come with some controversy following the release, which was very apparent when the Metacritic score came out. I will be addressing the complaints in this review, however, I feel that I should say how this game differs first.

You will be setting off from your hometown after picking one of the three starter Pokémon. You enrol in a special private school which has an event known as the ‘Treasure Hunt’ (don’t worry, there’s not much to this, it’s just an excuse for the game to set you off on your journey). The game then sends you off on one of three storylines, which you can do in any order. There’s the usual job where you battle all 8 gym leaders to challenge the Pokémon league, but there are also two more that have been added. You fight the enemy Team Star (a group of school delinquents) and you’re tasked with defeating them by a mysterious voice on the phone who remains unidentified for most of the game despite it being incredibly obvious, as well as taking on the Titan Pokémon- which does resemble something similar to some of the gameplay we got in Legends Arceus. If you liked that gameplay, this is the closest you’ll get to it.

Where the storylines go for two of these is certainly interesting, it feels like a lot of effort has gone into them. You can, of course, tackle them in whichever order you like- most people are going for the Titan Pokémon storyline first, which you might want to do because of how it helps you out with the open world. The Titan Pokémon each reward you with the ability to have the legendary Pokémon (that you ride in the game, in my case it was the dragon Koraidon)  go in the water, climb hills, run faster, jump higher, etc. Each of the challenges represents each type of Pokémon, so if there’s not a gym leader with that type, be assured that one of the enemies has that type.

That’s the basic grasp of the game, and while it does offer a bunch of new ideas, if you’ve been very familiar with Pokémon over the years, this one isn’t that much different.

PROS

• Open World Gameplay

The open world in this game is actually really good! The only complaint I have with it is that it doesn’t add a suggested level to each of the challenges. For example, the game encourages you early on to head east, with the map markers highlighting where the first gym challenge, Titan Pokémon, and Team Star base is. I felt that I had to take on each challenge in a specific order- but the Team Star challenge is of a much higher level than the gym battle. When I decided to go west for a brief period, I suddenly found that the area was much lower levelled and I was able to take on the area easily because I was way over levelled, including the first gym leader. If you don’t want to be over or under levelled, you might want to look up a guide for what order to do each gym and base. As for the Titan Pokémon, they don’t provide much of a challenge- there’s only one that I failed and came back to later. That part isn’t that challenging but it’s very worth doing.

This is seriously one of my favourite regions to explore, they did a great job of giving the region a personality! I really enjoyed the fact that the game’s day and night cycle wasn’t tied to the in-built clock on the Switch, it goes through its own in-game cycle, which helps you catch certain Pokémon at night and allowed me to catch an Umbreon.

The only complaint I have about the open world is that I don’t feel like the towns had as much personality as I would like. There are some good ones in here, don’t get me wrong., but I kind of felt that more effort was put into the towns in Sword and Shield. I certainly remember quite a few of them, particularly the icy town at the top of the hills, that’s become one of my favourite places in any Pokémon game!

I think my favourite part of the game was the gym leaders. They did a great job creating unique personalities for all of these gym leaders, my favourite probably being the Electric gym leader who is basically a Twitch streamer.

The ‘go anywhere attitude actually works pretty well. I do wish that they level scaled a little bit if they weren’t going to provide recommended levels for each area. The game does a pretty good job of making you realise what areas you shouldn’t be in but it’s not impossible to catch Pokémon that are of a much higher level. I managed to catch a really good Dragonair that was about 15 levels ahead of my strongest Pokémon at the time! Believe me, that came in handy much later!

The environments seamlessly blend into one another. It doesn’t seem like a sudden shift between each of the environments- though obviously, there are other aspects of the game which aren’t so seamless, which I’ll be discussing later.

• Selection of Pokémon

The selection of Pokémon is actually really good in this game. It’s a decent blend of previous generations as well as new Pokémon. I didn’t take too many Pokémon from this generation, though I did catch a few of them. One of my earlier favourites was Flamigo, a flying and fighting type Pokémon. I kind of stuck to what I knew so I could better navigate the world. I was trying to experiment with the new Tera-type mechanic, which you’ll get some of these through the new Tera raid battles, which are significantly improved. You can spot a bunch of them in the wild, you just have to look out for the very obvious glowing Pokémon. One of the ones I managed to find early was a Jigglypuff that can turn into a Water type which appeared in the trailer.

Because this was such a different game, I tried to stick with what I knew for my first playthrough, so I got myself a Raichu as well as all 8 of the Eeveelutions- which was made a lot easier because of the event that was held during the making of this review. That being said, the designs for this generation are some of the best they’ve had in recent memory. I really think there’s been some real thought put into them. My only complaint is that they still don’t have a National Dex at launch, which I wish was there considering it’s basically already in Sword and Shield, but I understand it will come with future DLC or an update. I think that there are too many Bug and generally small Pokémon in the game. If you’re trying to avoid Pokémon battles, it’s very easy to bump into them.

• Tera Types

This is a new mechanic introduced for these games. It’s essentially turning your Pokémon into crystallised versions of themselves, which in turn will impact the power of the types that are connected with the Tera type. It’s usually the type that the Pokémon already has- for example, if you have a Jolteon, the Tera type is usually Electric. However, if you do some of the Tera raid battles of catch one in the wild, you can get Pokémon that are different to their usual types! I took part in the Eevee raid event that was going on, and as a result, I had a Jolteon that could become a Ground-type Pokémon. The downside is that you can’t teach the Pokémon any moves of that type, but you will eventually get access to a move called Tera Blast which automatically becomes that type of move when the Pokémon is Terastilised.

Another downside is that you have to craft the T.M. to make it, and T.Ms are still one-use in this game, which is annoying.

I think that this new mechanic is great! It really benefits the game greatly for online play and will be particularly fun to see competitively. It really comes in handy if you have Dragon or Ghost-type Pokémon, since now you can take advantage of the fact that Dragon and Ghost type moves without having the weakness. I did this with my Electric-type Dragonair on a few occasions.

• The Lets Go Feature

This is a small thing but you can send out Pokémon to do auto battles in an area and greatly improves grinding. It saves a lot of time with battling. Bring this feature back and put it in the next Legends game!

MIXED

• Visuals

Okay, this game does not look amazing- but I don’t think it looks as bad as some people have made it out to be. The world and character designs have an interesting look to them, but it’s not pushing the Switch in many ways. That being said, it’s difficult to do a brilliant-looking Pokémon game because the art style can restrict what you can do. I know people will point to the game Pokémon Snap, but that game has loads of scripted events. You now have an open world with multiple things going on simultaneously, and so I think given all of the circumstances, that the visuals look fine. I’ll be interested to see where the team takes this on future hardware considering this will definitely be the last mainline Pokémon game on the current Switch model.

• Multiplayer

I didn’t do too much multiplayer, but I did manage to get a few examples of it. I did try the online multiplayer, though some of it was restricted. Ranked battles weren’t in the game at the time of review, so I couldn’t face anyone I would usually casually battle without them being ranked to my level. Hopefully ranked battles come in soon because I lost pretty much every fight I did online. I only currently have 3 victories to my name and I would have appreciated it if there was a ranking system for pairings.

I didn’t get a chance to try the online co-op, though I have heard that it does affect the framerate even further. I played with a couple of my friends using the wireless connection between Switches, and while there was a lag in between them for raid battles (something that I also noticed in online multiplayer) it actually functioned really well! The framerate actually wasn’t affected any worse from what we could tell playing in the overworld compared to playing single-player. Obviously, it still had some performance issues but they weren’t made worse by multiplayer.

As for the actual content of the multiplayer, you can’t do much other than play in the same area and link up for raid battles. But as a whole, I thought that it was really good fun. I just wish that there was a little more to it. Hopefully, the upcoming DLC will find some more use for this function.

• Camping

This feature returns from the previous game, but this time it’s called Picnics, where you make sandwiches instead of Curries. I have heard people say they preferred the curry minigame, but I personally prefer this one for many reasons. For one, I think the sandwich minigame is a little easier and provides more rewards and it rewards experimentation a little bit better. I thought it was better that in order to get the best features out of it that you don’t have to play it in multiplayer. I certainly don’t think it was much better than the curry game in many other ways, particularly the fact that it did feel like there wasn’t too much challenge, especially when you’re making one of the preselected recipes.

I did however prefer the interactions with your Pokémon whilst having the picnic, most notably the washing and playing with the ball.

CONS

• Performance

There’s no easy way to say it, the performance in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is not good. The framerate fluctuates quite a bit, especially in large towns, and the popping is horrendous (way worse than even Sonic Frontiers). That being said, once I got used to it, the framerate didn’t bother me too much. If you’re good at counting framerates and you don’t notice it as much as some people do online, it might not bother you as much. That being said, I don’t think that the game has been released in a great state and it definitely needs to be patched down the line, which I suspect will happen in January- but don’t quote me on that one if we go through January with no patch, I’m just basing that on what others who have more knowledge in the field have said as well as the timing of Sword and Shield’s patches.

There are a lot of glitches that have made the rounds online, but I personally didn’t get anything that bad, and my game only crashed a couple of times, the most persistent was when I was using a certain team for online battles. For some reason, it didn’t like me taking that combination of 6 battles onto an online game. For the most part, none of the glitches that made the rounds online appeared in my game. A lot of these clips swerve taken out of context in terms of what model of Switch was being used, how they were playing the game, and whether the Switch was docked or handheld.

For the record, I found that the framerate issues were much more prevalent when playing docked on television, I found that playing handheld was better, but I’ve heard people having opposite issues to myself.

The bottom line, the state of the game isn’t good. I still find it annoying that people are saying this is the next Cyberpunk 2077 when the game is nowhere near as broken as that one was at release.

• Lack of Customisation and Outfits

Don’t get me wrong, the customisation options for your character in terms of hairstyle, eyes, and every other feature is great. But in terms of the outfit, you must wear one of 4 school uniforms throughout the entire game. I know this is designed around the theme of going to school and being part of this prestigious academy, but man is it annoying! I just wish there were more options. I would have preferred that if for school assignments we wear uniforms but when we go into the real world we can wear whatever we wanted. I really hope that this is fixed with the DLC.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet do most of what I’ve wanted a Pokémon game to do for the longest time. The open world is great and I had a ton of fun, the selection of Pokémon is excellent, and while the visuals aren’t great, I don’t find them as terrible as some other people do and I think that it has its own charm. The performance issues hold this game back significantly and stop me from putting it in the upper echelon of scores.

I did enjoy the game’s content more than Sword and Shield, but that game performed better. If there’s one thing I think that this one performed compared to the previous games, it’s the post-game content. It’s not incredibly good, but it is improved.

This isn’t like the other ‘broken’ games in recent memory that had loads of glitches and performance issues. Most of the Twitter conversations that I found stopped talking about the performance issues after a certain point and started to concentrate on just having fun with the game, which I had a ton of fun playing it also. When you get down to it, the performance issues in other games are covering up bad to middle games, but in this game, once the performance issues get sorted, we have a real winner on our hands.

If you can’t wait to play it, you absolutely should- you can have fun with this game despite the performance issues. If you can wait, maybe wait until February to play it. The only reason I say that is because I believe at that point we’ll have a Pokémon Direct that tells us about patches and DLC.

In relation to the score I’m going to give, while this was an improvement on Sword and Shield, I think that the performance issues held it back. So because of that, I decided to give it the exact same score I would have given base Sword and Shield.

Final Score: 8.5/10

Next up is Reece’s Review

My experience with Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is that I have finished everything in my copy of Violet with the exception of finishing the Pokédex as the final side quest.

I played through the game on my Switch OLED using a combination of both docked and handheld mode to test the game and it’s performance across both modes. Pokémon Scarlet & Violet are the latest games in the Pokémon franchise with this new entry being classed as Generation 9 and the total amount of Pokémon now going over the 1,000 mark with 400 Pokémon of which to catch in this region’s Pokédex. The core of the story remains the same to pass games where you play as a customisable protagonist and set out into the new Spanish themed region of Paldea as you tackle each of the 3 new storylines and try your best to catch them all.

Pro:

Story.

Scarlet & Violet features the best story in any Pokémon game to date. While the school setting can be skipped during the entire game it is worth it to go back to and take part in the storylines there, since each of the classes features a Persona style social link with a member of staff on each course. Then after you finish your final exams and max out your relationship with the member of staff you hear more about their backstory and their relationship with the region, and you are also given a reward that makes it all worthwhile if the player glossed over the story.

During the course of the story the player is tasked with completing each of the 3 separate storylines with Victory Road, Path of Legends or Starfall Street. The player is free to tackles these stories in any order but all 3 must be completed for the ending of the story to take place.

I would recommend the Path of Legends to start with, since you unlock new abilities for your rise legendary that help makes map traversal faster and much easier. It also features my favourite storyline in the game with Arven and for the first time in a Pokémon game I got emotionally invested in the plot of this storyline and wanted to see it resolve.

This game features my favourite plot out of any Pokémon game and the final section of the game does a fantastic job in tying together of the lingering plot threads that are spread across the storylines. So it feels very rewarding to have a great payoff and it all culminates in one of my favourite final bosses in Pokémon that is accompanied by the best song in the soundtrack.

Characters.

This game has some of my favourite characters in the franchise now, with each character having much more depth than in previous games with longer storylines. This game features my favourite rival with Nemona, she easily outclasses any of the newer rivals since N from Black & White in generation 5. As not only does she have a friendly personality like the newer rivals but she isn’t annoying and dragging down the story with constant fights with bad teams.

The character design is also some of the best in the franchise with all the prominent characters in the game all having memorable designs to complement their roles in the story.

The characters range from more typical designs with the Normal type Gym Leader and Ground type Elite 4 member all the way up to the more bizarre and flamboyant outfits of the villain Team Star in this game that looks like they were all inspired by 80’s Glam Rock bands or Metal bands. This leads to the characters staying in the players minds long after the story is do e, and since you can rematch the Team Star bosses and Gym Leaders in the postgame it is great to revisit them and their inventive character designs.

Exploration.

For the first time in the franchise history, the region of Paldea is completely open world with the only loading screen being into certain buildings or leaving the main gates at the hub city of Mesagoza.

Due to the game being non linear in its new design allowing the player to go to any place on the map at any time it leads to a completely different journey for each new player, as each boss can be challenged in any order. Along the way by following the Path of Legend storyline will see the players box art legendary get more traversal options being seen as a merger of all the ride Pokémon from Legends Arceus merged into one Pokémon without having to swap them all the time.

Players can use these new abilities to reach secret locations to find rare Pokémon or rare items in real time, as there are no caves locked behind loading screens so if a player can see a location then 9/10 times they can reach said location by using their ride Pokémon.

This new freedom is used to its best effect in a new sidequest that persists throughout the story where players locate mysterious chained stakes driven into the ground across the map. Then without spoilers I would recommend players seeking out as many of these stakes as the reward is definitely worth it.

New game mechanic.

The Terastal phenomenon is the new mechanic introduced in this game, it sees a Pokémon becoming Terastallized through the use of the new Tera system. This is easily my new favourite gameplay mechanic introduced since Mega Evolution back in Generation 6, as it breathed new life into the competitive scene and made a lot of older and weaker Pokémon suddenly more viable which is always great.

Since the original games a Pokémon has always had a certain typing for it e.g. Pikachu being an Electric type Pokémon, this system dictated what enemy moves would deal either zero damage, half damage, normal damage or double damage to a Pokémon.

The only way these weaknesses for a Pokémon could of been subverted was with abilities or certain items. Since Electric types are only weak to Ground type attacks then if the Electric Pokémon had the ability “Levitate” then it would become immune to Ground type attacks eliminating that types sole weakness e.g. Eelektross. So now a Pikachu could have a Tera type of Flying, and then lose its Electric type and instead have the strengths and weaknesses of the Flying type. So it would lose a weakness of Ground instead turning it into an immunity but instead take double damage ironically from other Electric type attacks.

Now online battles are so much more strategic since any enemy Pokémon could potentially turn into any other type and said type would be completely unknown to the user as any Pokémon can have any other Tera type.

The mechanic is balanced in a fair way as only 1 Pokémon can terastallize per battle and only once per battle, so if an enemy Pokémon does Tera then you can be safe in the knowledge that no other enemy Pokémon can in that battle.

New Pokémon.

With a regional Pokédex of 400 I was apprehensive about the amount of new Pokémon for the region, since past games have been introducing less new Pokémon per region and recycling the past ones to speed up development of the games.

This fear was laid to rest since Scarlet & Violet introduced over 100 new Pokémon in this generation alone, and while some are more filler (See the Pawmi line that could of been a 2 stage line or the overabundance of birds in the region) for the most part the new designs are solid.

The biggest surprise for me was the new evolutions for returning Pokémon as this game introduced several and I would highly recommend new players try out some of the older Pokémon they see as some will be more rewarding with brand new evolutions. Multiplayer.

New to the series is being able to have 3 other players join your world for real time multiplayer, so now you can go on your journey through the game with 3 friends, and performance also wasn’t restricted in this mode as the game performed the same as when in single player.

Joining another player who was the opposite game version to the version the player has(A player on Violet joins the world of a Scarlet player) allows the player to catch the other version exclusive Pokémon to help complete the Pokédex with the exception of the final legendary that still needs to be traded for.

Story progression isn’t restricted as both players can continue the Gym challenge at the same time as other players but the battles are still single player only, so when playing with friends a player can still make progress and not have to worry about doing nothing while in multiplayer.

Music.

While the music isn’t as strong as it was with Sword & Shield it is still a fantastic soundtrack that suits the game well.

One glitch I encountered during my playthrough that was fixed in the first patch was an issue the game had with the looping of the music during an endgame boss fight, but that was resolved and now all the music in the game plays correctly and is very enjoyable and suits each situation on the 3 story paths superbly.

Con:

Performance.

The biggest issue I had with the game is just how poorly it performs on the Switch.

The game is supposed to run at 30fps but more often then not with the slowdown the game barely chugs at 20fps and above, and I have had instances where the game runs even lower and this mostly happened in the cities around the map even though most of the buildings cannot be entered so the buildings are just hollow textures.

Due to the low performance of the game it leads to massive amounts of pop-in while you’re in the field with Pokémon sometimes performing jumpscares on the player due to the randomly popping in right in front of the player while riding and cannot be avoided. Even with the latest patch (At the time of writing) that GameFreak released in some case the game performs worse in certain environments with more dropped frames.

This is a classic example of a game being rushed out to meet a deadline as even Legends Arceus released earlier in the year did not have these issues at launch both performance and graphical wise. The new open world mechanic is also not an excuse for this titles or is the specs of the Nintendo Switch itself, because the Switch has seen the release of other fantastic open world games such as Breath of the Wild, Skyrim, The Witcher 3 and my personal favourite of the bunch Xenoblade Chronicles 3. All of these titles perform much better than Scarlet &Violet with open worlds with much higher fidelity and with a higher frame rate with most hitting a near constant 30fps or above.

Another example of this is with the NPC character models in that their animation cycle is way too short and reduced to 5fps when more than 1 meter away from the player leading to very choppy animation cycles that look like they are in slow motion. This is most noticeable in a large scale when the player is in their classroom for the first time and all the non talking NPC all have these horrendously bad animation cycles that take the player right out of the experience since it’s so noticeable.

Glitches.

This is without a doubt the most glitch ridden and buggy a Pokémon game has released in the franchise.

Apart from the minor glitches that do not impact the gameplay much, with the near frequent camera clipping issues as the camera is not restricted to the terrain and will often go under the terrain and show the void under the terrain with the textures of the environment bleeding through. There are also the animation model glitches that grew like wildfire across the internet within hours of the game releasing, and these stem from character models becoming deformed and stretching to almost horror monster levels or random NPCs walking through the middle of battlefields before randomly disappearing.

The worst of the glitches that happen are when the game completely breaks and require restarting the game, I had these more often that any other Pokémon game and these included falling through the map into the void into the water that is at the bottom of the map. Then there were also the times I had hard crashes where the game closed on its own after an error, and these happened either in Terms raid battles online or occasionally in single player trainer battles.

Graphics.

Aside from the performance of the game the most obvious problem that Scarlet & Violet is the subpar graphics for this game and in a lot of aspects is a downgrade from even Sword & Shield.

The texture work for most of the natural environments (Hills and grassland) and constructed (Cities and buildings) all features low resolution, blurry textures that look similarly or slightly worse than Sword & Shield, but the big standout is how much worse the natural environment look in comparison to Legends Arceus. As we can see the repetitive texture mapping on the sides of cliffs and mountains being a small square texture that was copy and pasted repeatedly making them look hastily made and in a rush compared to Legends Arceus where the texture mapping uses much larger sections so it is harder for the player to see the reused texture mappings.

The shadow work in this game is also much reduced in comparison to both previous games as now a lot of environments do not feature shadows and if they do then they are mismatched and do not match the current day and night cycle with the Sun in the sky.

No level scaling.

Due to this being the first true open world game, the design philosophy was to let the player take on any of the various Gym Leader, Titans or Team Star Bosses in any order they wanted.

Unlike previous games that forced the player upon a more linear path where the player’s levels for their team were kept in mind for the next gym challenge to keep the fights a relative challenge. Scarlet & Violet has now removed that linearity to give the player more freedom, but this freedom is mostly an illusion as the player can take on the higher levelled gyms out of order causing their levels to be much higher than they were intended to be.

I myself did this, as I cleared the entire right side of Paldea first as it had fewer gyms and Team Star bosses on that side. Unfortunately by the time I had finished that entire side my team was way too overlevelled so when I started the left side my team was all in their 40’s and I swept through the first gym I came to which was the Bug gym and the leader has the lowest levelled team in the game and I one shot each of her team.

This is fun in concept to give the player a powertrip but it quickly made the rest of the game dull as I was too overlevelled for anything to pose a challenge, as after the Bug Gym I travelled south to fight the gym there and it was the Psychic Gym. This Gym was supposed to be the 2nd to last the plate takes on level wise but with no knowledge of a set order to give myself I challenge I rolled through her team too.

An easy solution for this would have been to have the Gym leaders team scale with the amount of badges the player has, as this would have avoided the problem of steamrolling through a Gym that was meant to be an early one that the player didn’t visit by mistake due to the lack of guidance.

Easiest Champion.

Geeta was too overly hyped and built up during the main campaign as the game promotes her as the “Top Champion” of the region but she has one of the most poorly constructed teams in the region so much so that other Gym Leaders and Elite 4 members outclass her.

Geeta has a great character design and it was a good change of pace to have her show up a lot in the story to build up her personality and how other people in the region admire her. Unfortunately due to her team composition it lead to the fight being the easiest Champion fight in the series since Lance back in Generation 2 or Alder in Generation 5 and really dampers the mood of the game after all the build up before the final arc of the game.

Her team needs a rework to be more challenging and to be more memorable as without spoilers her team is even ordered incorrectly with her final Pokémon that should really be her lead and another new Pokémon in this game that should of been her ace while having it be shiny to match her outfit. She even uses Pokémon that were used by the Gym Leaders from both this region and Kalos in Generation 6. She only has 2 unique Pokémon to her and that isn’t enough to make her stand out in this region and even on those Pokémon they all have movesets that don’t take advantage of the Pokémon with most of them having type overlap with Fairy and Psychic moves.

If this is the final Pokémon game on Switch then we will have seen 3 Champions with that being Leon (Sword & Shield), Cynthia (Generation 4 remakes) and now Geeta, but her team just does not stack up to the other Champions on this console generation. I hope if there is a DLC or enhanced edition (Generation 7 with Sun to Ultra Sun) down the line that GameFreak will give Geeta a team that is worthy of being used by a Champion like her that isn’t bad and worse forgettable.

Online stability.

The postgame of Scarlet & Violet is mostly made up of 6* and 7* Tera Raids, and while fun for a majority of the time I have had other players constantly disconnect or my turn being skipped for several turns in a row.

The game needs the option to perform Tera Raids with people from your own region rather than everyone everywhere at once, as the majority of disconnects I have is when I (As an EU player) connect with Asian players.

Reduced clothing customisation.

Compared to Sword & Shield and Legends Arceus, the player character cannot be customised as much as it is limited by the fact that the player must wear a school uniform at all times.

Removed quality of life features.

Scarlet & Violet removed a lot of the quality of life updates that Legends Arceus removed that really feel missed in this game. As now players can no longer catch Pokémon without engaging in battle with it, and along side that now the Pokédex has been greatly simplified as it has returned to a basic entry page compared to the older generations. I wish GameFreak kept in the more detailed Pokédex entries that expanded upon completing task with each Pokémon (Catch X number of them or use X move a certain number of times) as that felt more engaging in the gameplay as you study these Pokémon and form closer bonds with them.

Now you are also limited to only evolving your Pokémon when you gain a level instead of the better

system or evolving at any time the condition is met with said Pokémon. As it has reverted to the old system of having to mash the B button to stop the Pokémon evolving if you want to learn a later move at an earlier level.

The biggest quality of life reduction is the removal of the noise and visual effect that plays when a Shiny Pokémon spawns near you. In older games with static encounters you always knew if you found a Shiny due to the on-screen star effect when you started a random battle.

Then when Legends Arceus came out and gameplay moved into an open world with none static encounters a player would hear a jingle and see the star effect in the overworld so it was harder to miss. Whereas now for unknown reasons GameFreak has now taken out both the audio and visual cues that a Shiny Pokémon has spawned. This means that if a player is colour-blind or not looking at that specific Pokémon when it spawns, then they will have missed out on an extremely rare (1/4096) Pokémon for no reason that would have been found in older games.

No battle facility.

For the first time since Generation 1 (Red & Blue) the game lacks a post game battle facility for players to test their teams by facing a certain number of trainers in a row in exchange for points to purchase rare items.

Sword & Shield had one in the post game of the base game with the Battle Tower, and even

introduced another one in the DLC with the Isle of Armour and the variant facility with Master Dojo and it’s form of “Restricted Sparring”. This leads to the post game being very repetitive and a focus on multiplayer with other players for a challenge, so if the player does not have reliable internet access then they will struggle for any sort of post game challenge in single player.

Conclusion:

A good game that is held back by the poor performance of the game itself, as it feels like this game was rushed out of development too early and doesn’t live up to the quality of previous games like Legends Arceus and could of done with another 6 months of development or a larger staff working on the game.

Mechanically this is my favourite Pokémon game released for the mainline games, but it cannot be my favourite game overall until it is patched to remove the performance problems and glitches as other open world games do not have these issues that Scarlet & Violet suffered from.

Score: 7.9

And finally, Elliot’s review

Final Team: Quaquaval, Jolteon, Meowscarada, Pyroar, Gardevoir & Garchomp

As I mentioned in my Pokémon Legends Arceus review, the mainline Pokémon series has fallen into a somewhat tiresome series. While every game since the sixth generation has added something new to try and mix up the formula (with its biggest success being the Max Raid Battles in Sword and Shield) each game still doesn’t feel like it’s changed that significantly, and so like a Disney Princess tired of her current situation, we’ve been wanting something more. So when we learned that Pokémon Scarlet and Violet would be the first ever truly open world game in the series, needless to say me and likely most Pokémon fans got excited and thought that this would be the game that would finally bring this series out of the rut it’s put itself into. The question is, did it succeed?

While the story isn’t exactly at the forefront of a Pokémon game, in Scarlet and Violet they do things a little different. In the game you’re a transfer student at Naranja (Scarlet)/Uva (Violet) Academy where you befriend Nemona, the previous years champion who has a crippling addiction to Pokémon battles, and Arven, son of the highly praised Professor Sada (Scarlet)/Turo (Violet). On the way to the Academy you and Nemona run into a badly injured Pokémon called Koraidon (Scarlet)/Miraidon (Violet) who’s lost its ability to battle and decides to travel alongside you. After a time skip we arrive at an annual event called the Treasure Hunt, where students are encouraged to explore the region and find something they treasure. After this point you’re given free reign to explore the world, to catch Pokémon, aid your friends and find whatever it is that you treasure (which knowing this game will likely be “The friends we made along the way”). While the story is a bit more prominent in this game, it is still mostly in the background and doesn’t really become a factor until the end portion. Though what is there isn’t too bad.

Okay, let’s get this out of the way as I’m certain you’ve already heard the horror stories and seen the clips, this game runs like absolute trash. While I didn’t experience it as bad as other people did, I still found an abundance of frame rate and pop in issues, models move like a slideshow if you’re more than five feet away from them or just disappear into nothingness like they got Thanos snapped and numerous other issues that majorly bring the game down. You could argue that this is a very ambitious game and use the excuse that other Pokémon games haven’t had this much happen on it at once, but Pokémon Legends Arceus came out earlier this year and that runs extremely well, so I can’t see any good reason as to why this game runs as abysmally as it does. As for looks, the game looks fine. I do much prefer how Legends Arceus looks, but I will acknowledge that this game at least looks better than Sword and Shield, overall, it just looks fine. Sadly this game carries the same sin as Sword and Shield does however, and that’s that this game really needed voice acting. There are numerous cutscenes, like in Sword and Shield, where a character will be speaking as if there was voiced dialog, but there just isn’t any. If they’re gonna make those kinds of cutscenes a regular thing then I wish they would just bring in some voice actors to do a few lines, even Zelda did it for god’s sake. Easily the best part of the presentation is the music, just as you’d expect the songs are very upbeat and a lot of fun to listen to, the battle music especially is, for lack of better words, loud and action heavy. 

As said, this is the first true open world Pokémon game. From when the Treasure Hunt starts you’re given free reign to go wherever you want, however… you probably shouldn’t. Unlike with the wild areas in Sword and Shield there’s no level scaling, so every section will have wild Pokémon and Gym Leaders with a set level throughout the entire game. I wouldn’t mind it as much (it would be weird for your first Gym Battle to be against a lvl 14 Dragonite and your final one to be against a lvl 54 Lechonk for example) if they actually told you a minimum level recommendation for that section, but they don’t meaning that – unless you use a guide – you’ll likely be going into battles severely over or under levelled. Having one or the other would be fine, but having neither is just disappointing. 

Just like in Pokémon Legends Arceus  when you enter a Pokémon battle you don’t enter a battle area, you instead go straight into the battle from where you stand. While this is kind of cool, it does also lead to its own number of problems. While scripted battles are fine and work well, battles in the wild have a number of issues. Your biggest enemy in these battles will be the camera, it often feels too close to the action and will sometimes display the battle at an odd angle or just clip into the floor if you’re fighting on a slope. Just like the rest of the game, the frame rate at times tanks, which will of course slow battles to a crawl. In fact battles seem to be slow in general, with battle animations taking their time before damage is dealt and you having to go through the lengthy process of watching another Pokémon’s stats go up or down one stat at a time. As said these don’t occur in scripted battles as they’re set in stable and flat environments, but in the wild be prepared for some frustration. Another option is a bit like what you did in Pokémon Legends Arceus, where you can just throw the Pokéball and your Pokémon will autobattle whatever you point it in the direction of, though you do get less EXP than you would if you just battled normally. While I do like this, I didn’t really use it very often. Directing your Pokémon on who you want it to fight is very frustrating as you need to be facing it to be able to battle it, and the pitiful amount of EXP you got from doing so just wasn’t worth it. 

Another significant change is that wild trainer battles aren’t mandatory, instead you now have to actively talk to them to initiate a battle. I originally thought that I would like this, but now I wish they would just battle you when you walked in front of them. I found myself forgetting that constantly and it just drew me away from wanting to fight them when I could just battle wild Pokémon instead. Therefore the number of trainer battles I fought were significantly less than they would have been otherwise. 

The big new addition to this game is Terastallizing. Terastallizing is this game’s replacement for Dynamaxing, where not only does your Pokémon obtain a new crystalized  body, they can also change types as well. For example a Pikachu’s base Types is Electric, but by Terastallizing it you can make it a Ground or Fighting Type, not only will its strengths and weaknesses be swapped out for its Tera Type’s, it will gain bonus to damage if it uses an attack of that type as well. After using it you have to wait until your next rest at a Pokémon Centre before using it again and you can change a Pokémon’s Tera Type at one of the later points (at least what should be one of the later points anyway) of the game. In my opinion this is one of the best new mechanics that Pokémon has added by far, it really makes you think about what Tera Type you want to go with, whether you want an offensive or defensive advantage or you just wanna be silly with it and make Eevee a Dragon Type or something.

Taking the place of Max Raid Battles from Pokémon Sword and Shield are the Tera Raids Battles. These are accessed by crystals spread throughout the world. In these you and three other trainers (either NPC’s or actual players) take part in a battle against a Terastallized Pokémon. The Tera Type of these Pokémon will not be consistent and likely will not match the Type of the Pokémon you’ll encounter. Just like Max Raid Battles, these Pokémon’s moves will be more powerful and they will have more health. The differences include the fact that you lose by running out of time rather than having a certain number of Pokémon faint by the end. If you beat the Pokémon you can capture it – and it has a 100% catch rate – or you can leave it and can just collect the rewards for taking it down. You can also access Tera Raid Battles from the Poké Portal via the pause menu. There are numerous things I like about these battles, for starters they require more strategy than a Max Raid Battle does, as you’ll have to consider the Pokémon’s Tera Type as well as the Pokémon you’re battling, I also like that the penalty for fainting isn’t as severe as you’ll just have to wait a few seconds to be revived and you lose a bit to time from the timer. However there are a number of problems that I have with this as well, and it’s more to do with the game than the battles themselves. For starters there doesn’t seem to be any kind of turn structure, with it mostly acting as a free for all when it comes to attacking. While I can see what they were going for, the execution really didn’t work. For some reason it would lead to numerous times where I have to wait excruciatingly long to be able to attack again or even just to see my attack go through, and I always have to wait until our opponent finishes its animation before I can do anything. And then there’s the Poké Portal, I’m not kidding when I say that I’ve been told that I can’t access a Tera Raid more times than I’ve actually taken part in a Tera Raid, whether it’s because of communication issues or because that battle’s already started, it just won’t let me join. And to make matters worse, it takes a frustratingly long time for the game to even tell me that, as it’ll keep trying to connect me to that raid for unnecessarily long, I’ve actually timed it on numerous occasions and I every time I have it has exceeded 40 seconds (in other words it the time it takes for the game to tell me that I can’t join a Tera Raid Battle is about the same length of a Sonic 06 load screen). 

In this game you have three separate objectives to have completed by the end of the game. The more obvious one is the Pokémon League, which I’m sure we all know at this point, complete eight gyms and collect their badges to fight the Elite Four and become the Pokémon Champion, it’s the same old song and dance. Though this time the Gym challenges are quite different and, I must admit, are just bad. They offer no challenge at all and don’t even take place inside of the Gym, I beg for the old days where all you had to do is have a few battles and go through a series of puzzles to get to the Gym Leader.

The second is battling the Titan Pokémon. These are five giant versions of Pokémon that you can find in the wild that have been supercharged by consuming something called a Herba Mystica. You’ll have to fight these Pokémon twice in a row, once by yourself and once again with Arven. By beating these you unlock a new ability that Koraidon/Miraidon can use in the overworld; like climbing up walls or gliding. This is by a good margin the easiest of your main objectives, as they just require you to fight a slightly stronger than usual Pokémon, as long as you know their weaknesses you should be able to do these with little issue. 

Finally is the Team Star Bases. At the start of the game you’re given the task of defeating each of the Team Star Leaders and taking the team down by a mysterious being called Cassiopeia. When you enter the base you’re given the task of defeating thirty Pokémon within ten minutes by using the autobattle mechanic, afterwards you fight the Leader of that base. I do like these, it at least gives you a reason to use the autobattle feature (by forcing you to use it, but still), and the battles at the end are a lot of fun and can be quite a challenge, but I find the build up to be too easy. Ten minutes to just way too much time as I find it only takes me a couple of minutes to defeat thirty Pokémon. If it was in normal battles then I could somewhat understand it – though then it would probably not be enough time for some – but using autobattles only, it’s not even a challenge. 

TMs are done a little differently than they were with the previous games. Rather than being able to just buy them, you can now craft them by using Pokémon materials that you obtain in fights and can find out in the wild. Yes, a Pokémon game has added a crafting system and yes it is very tedious. I would much rather be able to just buy the TMs rather than having to go through the annoying grind of finding materials just so I can teach my Hypno Psybeam. Though one thing that I do really like returning from Pokémon Legends Arceus is the ability for Pokémon to remember moves they’ve already forgotten from the menu. It’s really cool that this is back as it means that I don’t have to find a specific NPC just to be able to relearn a move.

Outside of everything mentioned, the only thing I can really say about the complaints is that… it’s a Pokémon game. It’s still very easy (though this one is a bit more challenging than the last few), grinding can get monotonous at times, then there’s the usual complaint of Pokémon Home accessibility not being available until a few months from now. That’s all I can really say on that front… it’s a Pokémon game. 

Of all the Pokémon games I’ve played over the last few years, this is the one I’m probably the most upset about. Not because I think the game’s bad, because that’s absolutely not the case, but because it’s so close to being amazing. This is easily the best mainline Pokémon game I’ve played since Black and White. I think that the things it brings with it really work and I had a lot of fun playing it. The one thing really holding it back is the technical and performance issues, this is sadly the worst a Pokémon game’s ever launched, and I really hope Nintendo fixes it. Either way, if you can get past the frame rate issues and the myriad of problems that I’ve mentioned then I do highly recommend this game. I can easily see myself playing this one for a long time. 

8.5/10

Sonic Frontiers

(available for Playstation 4 & 5, Xbox Series S & X, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC, PS5 version used for review)

Sonic Frontiers has come out after being internally delayed for a year, with the hopes that this game would launch for Sonic’s 30th anniversary alongside Sonic Origins. It’s out now, and while we didn’t know much at the time, after seeing a trailer for it at last year’s Game Awards, it became apparent that this is an open world Sonic game (or Open Zone as the Sonic team like to call it).

You’re going to be doing a lot of what is typical in a Sonic game. The Boost Formula from games like Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Generations is still here, and the traditional Sonic levels are still in the game- known as the Cyberspace levels. While people were expecting it to be like Breath of the Wild, the team has pushed back against that also. You won’t be exploring one massive open world, instead you’ll be exploring five islands throughout the course of the game, with each island having a different biome. For example, the second island is a desert. The game also promised massive boss fights, which has been delivered on.

It seems like when it came out that a lot of people were suggesting that it was a good foundation for future games. The team has been ambitious with this open world design, but you can definitely tell that this is the first time that they’ve done it. It’s clear that the team is learning as they go along. This game is also made with a much smaller team than usual, but there were still a lot of really good names working on it. In the writer’s credits, we have Ian Flynn, who has been the writer of the Sonic comics for a very long time. He’s basically been taking control of that comic ever since Ken Penders left. I won’t go into much more detail on that, let’s just say I don’t have many nice things to say about Ken Penders..

I felt that I had a lot more confidence in this game, though I (like many others) waivered in my confidence when SEGA sent very boring looking gameplay to IGN over the summer, only for much better gameplay to come out in trailers and showcases.

It’s very clear to me that IGN was given very bad footage of a very early build, since I actually really enjoyed a lot of the routine in the gameplay, they just didn’t show it off well initially, especially there was no narrator to explain how any of the gameplay works.

PROS

• Open world gameplay

The open world gameplay is my favourite aspect of the game and where I had the most fun. I loved running around as Sonic, exploring the islands and taking part in various platform challenges that were scattered about.

There are several things to do in the open world, platforming challenges to create memory tokens for whichever one of Sonic’s friends are trapped in the island. You’ve got mini bosses to defeat to gain gears which unlock Cyberspace levels- which is how you obtain portal keys which you use to get some of the Chaos Emeralds. The goal of each island is to get all seven Chaos Emeralds to challenge one of the gigantic robots that are created by new character Sage, a Cyberspace creation of Doctor Eggman, in order to challenge him for a massive boss fight as Super Sonic.

You also have to get other collectables by completing puzzles or challenges which fill out parts of the map. You also have to collect the younger members of the islands’ inhabitants and bring them back to their parents to increase your speed and ring capacity. I wouldn’t increase your ring capacity if I were you, it just makes it harder to get 400 rings. Increasing your speed, however, is something I recommend, since these islands get bigger along the game.

There’s also a ton of combat options, and you’re going to want to pull off some amazing combos. It’s not as complex as a Bayonetta or Devil May Cry game, but I still really enjoyed trying all of the various button combos in battles with enemies. Especially when you can press the Action (Triangle button on Playstation) to create a Cyclone, which can launch enemies in the air to make them vulnerable to attacks.

Once again, the homing attack isn’t simply a double jump, but in the case of PS5 it’s the Square button, and the Boost is now the back right trigger, or R2.

Sonic really controls well in the open world, I didn’t die that often because of lacking physics or over responsive controls. It was just very enjoyable to play! I loved finding new challenges to try out, and some of the platform challenges really encouraged me to try out new things.

It does what my favourite open world games do, where you can just enjoy exploring more than anything else. If you get bored of the routines early on though, it won’t get better. This is a game where it’s the exact same pace from start to finish.. There’s not much of a break from it. But the boss fights are some of the best parts of the game! Any one of them could have been a final boss in other Sonic games, and they do a fantastic job selling it. The pacing of them is great, and you have to learn their moves very quickly because you’re on a time limit with the amount of rings you have- and some boss fights won’t give you a refill. Believe me, they can knock you back so far that you won’t have a chance to even get back to them before your time runs out!

I also didn’t find the environments to be barren wastelands with no features like some were fearing. There were some landmarks that I could use to help navigate the world and that is always a great sign, in my opinion.

Bottom line is: I thoroughly enjoyed the open world aspect. While I was comparing it to games like Breath of the Wild and Shadow of the Colossus, the game that it really reminded me of was Bowser’s Fury; the add-on to the Switch version of Super Mario 3D World. While I think that both of them feel really experimental in what an open world take on their franchise would be, I felt that Sonic Frontiers feels like a fully realised concept. Bowser’s Fury felt like a good idea but it felt more like a prototype, whereas Sonic Frontiers feels like a first step. That’s not to diss Boswer’s Fury at all, I really liked that game and I think that it would be a great game if Nintendo wanted to flesh it out more.

• Story

If you have been reading a lot of the Sonic comics you will easily recognise that this is a project written by Ian Flynn. The only thing he hasn’t done is make Eggman as despicable as he is in the comics. If you think Eggman is a goofy villain, read some of Flynn’s comics! He can make him really menacing.

As a writer, Ian Flynn tends to be very good at taking concepts already established in Sonic and doing something interesting with them, and he rarely tries to put his own stamp on the franchise- or at least not one that would shake up the franchise in a massive way. Frontiers is the first time it feels like he’s been given free reign to put his take on the future of the Sonic franchise. Despite some people disliking the story of this game, I felt like it read like one of his comics, which I really like! He does a very good job with character writing, especially with new character Sage. Her character arc is really good and I really like the relationship between her and Eggman that resembled a father-daughter relationship.

The only other thing I think about the story is that Eggman doesn’t really get much to do until later on in the game, although there is some good character writing. Particularly around Knuckles, and Tails even got an interesting character arc to such an extent that I think they are preparing for a Tails spin-off game which I am very much in favour of.

I also thought that he does a pretty good job with the rather basic requirements and story that he has been given. Sonic and his friends are drawn to a place where the Chaos Emeralds have congregated, and where it goes from there is kind of interesting, because I feel that Flynn has made a retroactive change to the origin of the Chaos Emeralds, though how much that will stick depends on how much this game is merged with the continuity of the comics. It likely will get some aspect in there, considering that the current series does take place immediately after Sonic Forces. Bottom line is, if you like the comics, you’ll like the story this time.

• Performance and Resolution

When you start up Sonic Frontiers on PS5 or Xbox Series X it will immediately run at 4K 30fps. It does have a 60fps mode, and as soon as you get control of the game, pause it and turn on 60fps! Even if you have a 4k monitor, do not play this game in 4K 30. Not only is it unstable, but you have to play this game at 60! You’re not getting much of a bump to the resolution either, I thought that it would be 1080p when played at 60, but it’s actually a very good 1800p. As a result, the game looks fantastic!

This is the first open world game to be done in the Hedgehog Engine that has been used since Sonic Unleashed, and I think that that engine is ageing very well. The environments look really crisp and the mirage effect that you get in the desert island is really good. The performance on PS5 is really good and there are barely any drops at 60fps. I am aware that the only other format where 60fps is available is on PC. Xbox Series S owners, for example, are getting the same game, but it’s a weaker hardware so only runs at 30fps. I’ve heard that the Switch version runs the weakest and does have some issues- but I’ve also heard that people who are playing it that way are enjoying it but it doesn’t look as good in handheld.

Once you get this thing running at 60 and you have the versions that offer it, this game runs brilliantly, and I really don’t have many complaints.

• Soundtrack

It’s a Sonic game, so the soundtrack is usually very good, but I think this one is a massive step up from Sonic Forces which I felt had a weaker soundtrack compared to other games.

The soundtrack can be divided into three parts, you have the rather ambient music that is played in the open world, the more techno and dance inspired tracks used for the Cyberspace world, and the metal music used for the boss fights. If you know my music taste, you’ll know that the boss fights were where I enjoyed the music the most, but I felt that the ambient music was really good also, and I actually felt that the techno and electronic music fit the Cyberspace worlds really well due to the technical nature of them.

As a result, I think I will be picking up the soundtrack of Sonic Frontiers in its entirety, instead of picking and choosing songs like how I did from the Sonic Forces soundtrack.

MIXED

• Cyberspace levels

I’m quite glad that they brought in the Cyberspace levels, it feels like a good bridge between the classic 3D Sonic gameplay and the new style of gameplay, but I felt like they were a mixed bag. The negatives are that it’s nothing we haven’t already experienced in previous games. These are pretty much slight recreations from Sonic Generations, you’re going to be seeing Green Hill, Sky Sanctuary, etc, there’s only one new theme which is the Citadel.

The other problem is that they have a similar issue to Sonic Forces- which is that they’re really short. I don’t mind the fact that you have infinite lives in them, since your rank is based on how quickly you can finish the level and the clock doesn’t stop from start to finish. I did like the fact that they encourage replaying. There are four keys to get in each level, one for collecting all five rings, one for reaching the goal, one for getting an S rank, and one for finishing the level with a certain amount of rings. It encourages you to try out different routes of each level and to play the levels in different ways. I would try to get all of the red rings first time around since they’re usually the hardest to pull off since different rings can be in different routes of the map and might require multiple playthroughs. Luckily, any red rings you collect in your first playthrough stick, so you won’t have to get it the next time you go around.

The physics aren’t as good in the Cyberspace levels, since it feels like they were designed strictly for the open world.

I did enjoy these levels, I wouldn’t go back to repeat them over and over, but I did attempt to get all four portal keys in each one since there was a bonus for doing so. I kind of wish that there were fewer of them and more missions or different themes instead, and I wish they were a bit longer.

• Moments the game goes 2D

I’ve been saying this since Sonic Unleashed, but I don’t think that this style of boost gameplay was meant for 2D. There are good moments where it works, but there’s just as many moments where it throws you off and feels restrictive.

Generations is the game that got the boost gameplay down the best, and while this game has its moments where it really works, it also has moments that threw me off and I didn’t enjoy it.

CONS

• Popping

This game has some of the worst popping I have ever seen! You will see flat forms appear out of nowhere. I understand that this was a small time and this is their first open world game with this engine, but this really needs to be fixed in a follow up. It’s not terrible, you can still see stuff in the distance and popping isn’t an uncommon issue in other open world games, but I really felt it in this game.

• Island 3

Island 3 is fine, but it’s where I felt the most frustration. It was almost impossible to find my way to it, this took a lot of frustrating navigation. It’s probably the most annoying. I was just trying to find out where I was meant to get to, all the while being cut off from various Chaos Emeralds.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I have to concur with other players by saying this is a rea\lly good foundation for future Sonic games. It does have performance issues and I felt that the physics didn’t quite work in Cyberspace, but I probably had more fun with this 3D Sonic game compared to the other ones since Sonic Generations. If it wasn’t for the popping and other small issues, this could be a contender for the best game I’ve played this year. As it stands, it’s a game I really like and is a really good Sonic game, but I’m wondering if I’m going to still have that opinion several years down the line when we have another game that uses this formula but has extended out the ideas even further.

Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope

(available for Nintendo Switch Only)

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle was a major hit in the first year of the Switch’s life, and clearly Nintendo liked how it went, considering they not only commissioned more DLC for the game, but they have now created a sequel. The game was shown at E3 2021, showing off the new space theme for the game, as well as a few new characters.

My personal opinion on Kingdom Battle was that I liked it, but I felt that it had room to grow. It felt like they had a lot of good ideas but it needed some more scope. The game also felt a little too linear for my liking, and I wasn’t a huge fan of exploring all of the environments as a result. But overall, I felt like the gameplay was enjoyable, I just didn’t feel like it was the best game ever at the time – especially since it came out in 2017, which was an amazing year for video games, particularly Nintendo who had a fantastic first year of the Nintendo Switch’s launch.

So, if Sparks of Hope was going to expand on those ideas, I was very much up for it. But considering it came out a week before Bayonetta 3, I did feel the need to get this game over and done with pretty fast so I could put all my concentration behind Bayonetta.

So, with all that being said, how did Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope turn out? In my opinion, pretty well! There are a few issues with the game, but if anything, I think that expansion I was hoping for from the first game is here. However, in a couple of ways, I feel like the series has regressed, though I’m wondering how much the ongoing Season Pass might change that. I bought the Gold Edition of the game which comes with the Season Pass, but not much has been announced about what to expect from it, other than Ubisoft’s own Rayman will be joining the game at a later date- though if he’s coming with an extra story mission is another matter.

PROS

• Improved Gameplay

Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is still a tactical strategy RPG, you still go through moving character’s positions, choosing which characters suit particular opponents, managing equipment, and you need to use the environment to your advantage, there’s a lot of variables in the game. The big difference this time comes in two forms: the sparks, which is a sort of crossover from the Lumas from Mario Galaxy and the Rabbids (furthering the space theme of this game) and these act as equipment for your team which will add special abilities and attacks, as well as provide you with resistance to certain attacks, since there’s several different times of elemental attacks. The other change is that the characters are not on a grid anymore, the characters are a lot more free, and as a result when you do the character leap movement from the first game, you can be a bit more precise with where you’re going to land.

The game also adds new characters this time, including a new Rabbid called Edge, Rabbid Rosalina, and Bowser, who is the only new Mario character in the game so far. I have more to say on what this might mean later…

The biggest additions to the game definitely improve it in my opinion. I think that the sparks add another level of strategy and make character loadouts before battle much more interesting, I certainly put a lot of thought into these each time. I also thought that moving away from the grid structure actually benefited the game. It’s not the most drastic change ever, this is still basically X-COM for kids, but I honestly thought that giving more freedom of movement meant that the maps could have more interesting design choices.

If there’s anywhere else that the gameplay improved, I thought that the boss fights were more challenging than usual. Though many of them have a bit of personality, none of them match the Phantom from the first game.

The other thing that the improved in the gameplay was that the environments felt fun to explore, they felt less like boxed in hallways and more like living, breathing worlds.

Not including the final world, you travel to five worlds in total. The first four being based on the four seasons of the year. These levels actually do invite you to explore them after the fact, you get new equipment and abilities which make you able to traverse certain areas during your repeat playthrough, which adds extra incentive to do the side missions, especially considering many of the sparks you can get from doing side missions. In fact, some of the best sparks I got came from doing side missions!

Overall, this gameplay really feels like the improvement that I was hoping for with the Mario + Rabbids franchise going forward.

• Graphics

This game looks really good, especially if you’re playing with a Switch OLED screen. The game is made in the SnowDrop engine that Ubisoft has been using, and while I personally think it hasn’t worked for many of their games, this game is definitely the exception. These games look really good and I think that this game has improved on the first.

The environments look really crisp, and the world designs are also incredible to back it up. Even if they are a little small for my liking.

There obviously is a resolution bump when playing this game in portable mode, though it’s actually not as noticeable compared to some Switch games that have come out this year. Though I would say, this is a game you will want to play docked as much as possible if you have a good monitor.

MIXED

• Game Length

Mario + Rabbids is once again a pretty short game. The main story can be beaten in about 14-16 hours, and if this is the only game you have for a while, you might want to max this out as you can get about 42 hours from it.

The problem for me was that by the end I felt like most of the improvements (in terms of graphics and gameplay) were running short on me. I kind of feel like in some aspects this game is a little too jam-packed with very similar battles. You’re going to see a lot of repeat battles and they tend to feel similar.

I personally thought that the game length was perfectly fine but I also felt that for many people it could hit a nerve, especially considering that this game is full price and actually costs more to get with a Season Pass, which you won’t feel the benefit for until next year, and it could be further beyond that since the note suggested that we could be getting the DLC in 2024 (not accounting for potential delays as well).

If anything, I think Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope might hit that middle ground that it doesn’t want to hit. Too short for the people that want a long game and too long for people who want a short experience. Again, this will vary depending on how many of the side missions you want to do, or if you want to go straight for the story.

Personally though, by the time I got to the final boss, I was losing a lot of the adulation I had in the early portions of the game. I was starting to notice more and more that it was just a slightly better version of Kingdom Battle instead of the vast improvement that I thought it was initially.

• Story

I actually think that the story is a lot better this time around in many regards. It centres around Mario and the Rabbids taking on an intergalactic being called Cursa, who wants to use the Spark’s power for its own gain.

The story wants to be kind of epic whilst also being kind of silly, and it doesn’t quite hit the balance that it wants to. I did like some of the tie-ins to other Mario games that we got towards the end of the game, but that’s also another issue I had with the Mario cast being here, is that they kind of feel incidental this time. While the Mario Galaxy theme is sort of here, it also feels like the Rabbids take most of the focus this time, especially newcomer Edge (who was my favourite character in the game).

As a result, the story does feel like kind of a mixed bag and feels like less of a crossover, which I felt a lot more after Nate the Hate pointed it out on an episode of SpawnCast, with a suggestion that Ubisoft might be looking into the idea of keeping the franchise going if Nintendo doesn’t want to create any more of these games.

CONS

• Difficulty

My advice is that if you want a challenge, you’ll have to turn this game up to the highest difficulty. The boss fight is the only challenge in this game that I faced, I very rarely had to hit the reset button for any fights..

I think it was also because you’re not buying new weapons this time, you’re only spending money this time to buy new items like mushrooms for healing or power blocks to provide a bit of environmental damage. You can change the way your weapons look but that requires collecting the local currency of each planet by completing side missions, and I didn’t bother since they didn’t provide any stat boosts, and you get a couple of new looks anyway with the purchase of the Season Pass.

Other than that, I thought that the game was a bit too easy, especially once you’ve figured out all of the enemies weaknesses, and you don’t get a lot of enemy variety in this game.

• Yoshi Missing at Launch

I’m saying this now because he could be added later, but both Yoshi and Rabbid Yoshi aren’t in the game. I think personally that this was a bit of a bad decision, since I really like Yoshi and to see him missing feels a bit off. Though I will say, the game’s Season Pass will go down in my estimation if his addition is part of it, because at the end of the day that’s essentially taking out content from the first game only to charge to get it back. That being said, it won’t affect the score too much this time due to it being a personal opinion and I can’t mark it down since we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen with it at this stage.

Final Thoughts

Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is an improvement on Kingdom Battle, but it’s not a huge one in my opinion. It is a good improvement where it counts like in the gameplay, environments, graphics, and it even has a great soundtrack made by all-stars such as Grant Kirkhope and Yoko Shinomura.

Overall, I didn’t think that this game was amazing but I still enjoyed my time with it, even if it was weighing on me towards the end. If you enjoyed the first one, I think this one will give you more of what you liked. If you’re curious about it but don’t have time for both games, I would recommend this one more. It doesn’t tie in too much to the first one, but the only context the first one provides is why Mario and the Rabbids are sharing a world. If you’ve never played tactical RPGs either, this is a good way to get into them.