Dustin Farr

This is the best thing released in the past decade. Easily. The creativity is off-the-charts. The animation is breathtaking. The atmosphere is palpable. Truly a masterpiece.

If you're a diehard pokemon fan I would say go for it. Otherwise.. it had a lot of flaws that I don't think are acceptable from a game set at an $80 pricetag from an alleged AAA company. I found it to be a bad game. The good: - The fresh take on the typical pokemon game loop. It's cool that some of them would attack you and you had to dodge. My pains: - Graphics are genuinely terrible for this age. It went for the cartoony low poly approach, and the textures look like they're off of a gamecube game.. if even that good. Seriously there are better games from 2000-2003 gamecube with better graphics than this. There is also an abundance of laziness in how populated and alive the world felt. It felt dead other than the pokemon. - It forces you through hours (literally) of a tutorial that has horrible dialog and a completely non-engaging story. Over explains mechanics that are extremely straight-forward, and honestly kind of under explained others that needed it more. - The quests were immediately repetitive.. the research tasks felt like a giant checklist of repeating actions a certain # of times. Catch this pokemon 30 times... why? Repetitively battling pokemon is grindy enough without having to introduce other repetitive questlines and checklists of repeating actions. Overall felt like a very lazy game. They came up with a cool idea, put time into the pokemon and the battles.. then gave up everywhere else and it's blatantly obvious.

Summary: 16 hours played. Not worth buying. Try for free if you have xbox game pass (and even then..) otherwise save your money. Cons: Horribly buggy mess. Mechanics are sluggish and unresponsive. Animations are okay at times, and limiting at others. Monsters have weird pathing issues with dead bodies/players. Hit boxes extend beyond the character/monster models. Various bugs throughout the levels. In one instance the final boss never spawned and we had to EXIT the game, losing all XP, items, etc from the level. Wasted an hour of time for a bug to wipe us out. Audio design is decent, but music is choppy and triggers inconsistently. Party never returns properly to the hub, everyone disconnects and we need to go through the 5 minute process to re-invite everyone. UI is horrible; no sliders for values in settings and the focusing when selling items always returns to the first item in the list instead of moving to the next. Interacting with objects in the world (ladders, loot, reviving, etc) is incredibly frustrating and finnicky, sometimes you lose your moment for a revive just trying to get the prompt to show up. End-game is lacking for content. This is basically an unpolished ripoff of vermintide that falls short in most aspects. It's clear that this game was rushed through QA. It felt like the quality of an early access game.. but without the early access title and a $50 game price. Cannot in good conscience recommend this game to anyone. Pros: Level design is great. Game assets look pretty.