REVIEW] Pokemon Quest

 I’m a sucker for Pokemon games. I’ve played most of them, including the numerous spin-offs, and typically I end up enjoying them, even if I don’t get hopelessly addicted to them the way I do for the series core games. So when I discovered a mobile game called Pokemon Quest, I knew I was going to give that one a try too.

 
BLOCKS ON BLOCKS ON BLOCKS

The story of the game, if you can really call it a story, is that you discover a new and filled with Pokemon that are made out of blocks. Picture the style being like Pokemon meets Minecraft. Voxelmon. Unexpected concept, admittedly, but at this point in time, the whole voxel aesthetic is overdone. And honestly, I’m not even sure why it was done here, since it doesn’t serve any particular purpose. Was it to attract an audience that is obsessed with voxel-style games but usually disdains Pokemon? Was it just easier to program blocky creatures rather than ones with more defined and realistic shapes? I really couldn’t say.

The style doesn’t really detract from the game, at least (unless you’re completely over the voxel aesthetic), but it doesn’t add anything either. And it raises more questions than it answers. Mostly: why? If there was some line of dialogue in the game that said these things were Pokemon robots that got loose and somehow reproduced and now live happily in the wild, you know what, it’s ridiculous but I can accept that. It’s at least a reason for the look.

But really, on the whole, it’s just cosmetic. What matters more is how the game plays.

THE GAME PLAYS ITSELF

 
The island you’ve arrived on is split into different areas, ranging from easy to hard, and each areas gives a particular type of Pokemon a strength advantage. What do you do in these areas? You battle wild Pokemon, of course. Specifically, you take your team of 3 Pokemon and you let them wander around the zone, battling groups of wild Pokemon as they are encountered (usually 3-4 waves), culminating in a boss fight with an extra-large extra-strong Pokemon. You can’t control where your Pokemon move. You can’t control their basic attacks. You can tell them to scatter, which gives them distance from whichever group of wild Pokemon they’re currently fighting or approaching, and you can trigger their special attacks by tapping on icons at regular intervals, but that’s pretty much it.

You can also tap a little “Auto” icon that essentially lets the game play itself. You can’t input commands, your Pokemon team will battle automatically, and you can pretty much just put your phone down for a couple of minutes and wander away to make a sandwich or get a drink or do anything else while the game just keeps going. If your team is strong enough to take on an area with no problems, this is an excellent low-investment way to level-grind.

It’s also boring as anything, because you’re not actually doing anything but waiting for the exploring and fighting to end so that you can collect experience and Power Stones (more on those later), and then do the whole process over again until your energy runs out.

Which is another thing worth mentioning. Like just about every mobile game these days, exploration requires energy. The justification is that you have a flying drone thing called a MoBee that… I guess follows your team around to give you a bird’s-eye view of everything, plus issue commands to your Pokemon if you’re not just letting the game play itself. MoBee has a limited battery life. You start off with 5 battery points, use 1 for each excursion, and you regain 1 point every half an hour. This effectively limits your ability to play the game when you want to… unless you spend that premium currency to refill your battery so you can keep going, of course! You get that premium in-game currency for completing quests and challenges, but honestly, this is just the same cheap tactic used by every mobile game dev in order to squeeze money out of players. Give them a free game, but tell them that they can’t actually play as much as they want unless they’re willing to fork over some real-world cash to buy premium currency to recharge their energy.

I can’t even be angry about that tactic anymore. It’s everywhere, it’s not going away any time soon, and even if I’m sick to death of it, nobody’s going to stop doing it.

I’m all for game devs being compensated for their work, so I get why microtransactions are used to supplement a game that’s otherwise completely free. I won’t begrudge them that. But that doesn’t make it less irritating when I just want to keep playing a fun game but I have to wait a couple of hours because the game tells me I’ve had enough.

Anyway.

GRIND, GRIND, GRIND

 
Being able to put the game on auto-play is pretty much essential, because you will need to do a lot of grinding in Pokemon Quest. A lot! As previously mentioned, each area gives a combat and strength advantage to a particular type of Pokemon. You acquire Pokemon in 2 ways. The first is by just waiting around — every 22 hours, a random wild Pokemon will visit your home base and join your team. The other way is through a cooking pot, where you dump random ingredients, wait for a while (by which I mean, go on a set number of expeditions that satisfy the cooking pot’s timer), and then a Pokemon will be lured in by the scent of whatever you cooked. Different ingredients appeal to different Pokemon, so it’s worth experimenting and seeing what you can attract when you need it.

But just having Pokemon of the right type isn’t enough, because they need to be strong enough to survive the battles in whatever area you’re exploring. Pokemon get stronger by leveling up (usually with a 1-2 point increase in their HP and Strength, which are the only stats Pokemon really have in this game), and by being equipped with Power Stones, which you win from battles. The more difficult the area you battle in and explore, the stronger the Power Stone you get as a reward. This seems like it should be a fairly simple progression from one area to the next so long as you have a decent team.

But the definition of “decent team” is not what you’re thinking of if you’re used to other Pokemon games. Your needs and priorities will differ from area to area, and you’re better off making a full team focusing on whatever type gets the advantage in the area you need to be. If the last area you fought in favoured Fire Types and the next one favours Ground types, you’re better off just creating a whole new team of Ground Pokemon.

Which may need some leveling. And will likely need some strong Power Stones to beef up their stats. Which will probably mean grinding in the strongest area you can handle, often for a full day or more, just to get what you need in order to advance to the next area without getting your voxel butt kicked. It is a slow tedious process, made even slower and more tedious by the fact that remember, you only get a full battery charge every 2.5 hours.

I’ve taken to setting the game on auto, letting my team grind in the strongest area they can, and just reading a book while the battles play out on my phone. I’m not playing the game at this point, but mostly letting it play itself. Every once in a while, I’ll advance a little further, clear a new area, evolve a Pokemon to make everything easier, but honestly, on the whole, this is a game that isn’t really much of a game. Games are things you interact with. The most interaction I do is placing a new Power Stone every once in a while, or adding ingredients to the cooking pot. The main “activity” in the game is completed by the game itself, without needing me.

 GameFreak may be known for making some great games, but this really isn’t one of them. The biggest draw is the Pokemon name; were it not for that, I wouldn’t have looked twice at it, and I suspect the same can be said for a lot of people who gave it a try. It’s not bad, per se, but it’s far from good. It’s very forgettable, really, and a lot of that comes from the fact that you don’t really have to do much of anything with it. If you’re desperate for a Pokemon game on your phone that actually will engage you, you’re better off going with something like Pokemon Shuffle. That one’s just a simple puzzle game, but at least you actually do something with it.