Ryan Efantes

Alright, so... I've been a huge Pokemon fan ever since 1996, and I'm still a fan even in my 30's, so when I saw Temtem, I was excited because it looked as though it was going to be a real competitor to Pokemon. I went into it, hopeful that it would be great. Sadly, such was not the case. By no means is the game bad, or terrible. It's quite solid, and despite being a Pokemon fan, I'm going to try and compare the two as little as possible here, except where I feel it matters most. The Good: - It's an MMO, which is fantastic, and is something I wish Pokemon Sword and Shield did. - Some of the Temtem are very well designed and cool. - It's challenging, and doesn't pull any punches. - Character customization is solid and nice to have. The Bad: - Alot of the available Temtem aren't very interesting or appealing to look at, and don't have as much personality as I'd like. - It's challenging, and doesn't pull any punches. - The type chart is WAY out of balance and very confusing to get used to. (Certain type matchups make zero sense.) - Early game areas offer little to no Temtem variety, making team building very difficult. - The grinding for levels feels tedious and frustrating. - Breeding is an absolute chore, and certain moves being locked behind breeding is needlessly frustrating. - Temtem evolution levels are frankly, ridiculous. Needing to level up a certain number of times means that your Temtem will never reach its' evolution until insanely late. Sometimes as late as high level 40's, which is typically a final stage level in Pokemon games. There's more, but these are my main issues with Temtem. It has alot of potential, but the issues mentioned above are far too massive to ignore. The game cranks it up to 11 very early on, so much so that the first Gym leader is absurdly hard. I can appreciate difficulty, but not like this. Leveling is a chore, breeding is painfully slow and annoying to do, and type matchups are very weird. To put things into perspective, I had caught a squid-like Temtem, and discovered that in order to evolve him, he needed around 30 or so level ups. I caught him at level 15 or so, meaning he would have had to be level 45 just to evolve. He's a two-stage Temtem. Additionally, after finally evolving him, I found out that he cannot learn any Toxic Type moves UNLESS I bred for the move... So I had to catch a dozen of these things, find a suitable breeding partner, and breed another 7-8 of them, just to get one with the ability and move I needed. And of course, now this new one starts at Level 1, while my team is all high 30's or so by that point. It was asinine to have to go through that much hassle for a single Temtem to get a move that it SHOULD have had via level up. So long story short, the game could have been good, but some massive oversights on some of the mechanics have more or less turned me off of the game. I'll stick with Pokemon. I know it's not perfect, but the formula they've run with for 30 years is still working to great effect, and playing Temtem showed me why Pokemon is still holding strong. That said, I do hope they can be successful with it, as I do want to see more Pokemon-like games enter the fray and give the mega franchise a run for its' money.