Spectrobes

"Great Ideas, Poor Implementation"

I wanted to like this game more. I really did. After hearing about it for a couple of weeks and flipping through the strategy guide I was really excited. The graphics looked amazing and the Spectrobes themselves cooler than anything I've seen in a monster collecting game in a long time. The game has so many great ideas... a real time battle system, interesting uses of the touch screen and microphone, awesome-looking monsters, and cards that you place over the touch screen and tap through small holes in them in order to unlock things. Unfortunately, none of these ideas that could have lead to a fun and original experience are carried out very well. Instead, Spectrobes ends up being mediocre and often downright dull with clunky battles and extremely repetitive gameplay.

Spectrobes are fossilized life forms and the only things that can defeat an evil planet-devouring menace. You play as a boy named Rallen (I was disappointed in the lack of any customization for the main character, you can't even rename him) and travel to several plants uncovering and reanimating Spectrobes to fight alongside you. You use a young Spectrobe to help you search for things buried in the ground and then play an excavation game with the touch screen to dig them up. Though you can purchase new excavation tools that make this process go much quicker, excavation is fun the first five or six times. Pretty soon, it gets really old and you wish the mechanics evolved at all, that there was more to it, or there was some totally different ways to get minerals and cubes... because you are going to need lots of them.

Once you dig up a fossil, you can reanimate it with voice recognition. This is pretty fun. Afterwards you can place baby Spectrobes in an incubator and feed them minerals, and pet them in an almost virtual pets like twist, that you excavate until they meet their individual requirements to evolve into adults. Adult Spectrobes, and later Evolved Spectrobes, can be used in battle. Battles are fought in real time and you can have up to two Spectrobes with your character at any time. The battle system is slow and would greatly benefit from a lock-on feature. Often, your Spectrobes will completely miss the enemies even if they were right next to them. The most annoying thing about the battle system is that between attacks you have to wait until a small bar refills before you can attack again. This takes any possible fun out of battles, and what could have been the awesome feeling of pounding on enemies with cool, powerful monsters, becomes boring and clunky.

The graphics are pretty impressive here, with the 3D environments being sharp and colorful and the Spectrobes themselves impressive to look at in battle. Still, the DS is not the best medium for 3D graphics, the townspeople tend to look like identical blobs and things aren't very detailed. The main character and his chosen Spectrobes animate well in battle. The game also features a few high quality movies.

The majority of the game is spent traveling from planet to planet on different missions. Even though each planet is unique, what you do quickly falls into a pattern. You arrive on a new planet, you talk to the people standing around, then you spend lots of time fighting battles and excavating new fossils and items. Finally, you move on to your main objective on that planet. They are very few sidequests and hardly anything to do but follow the main storyline, which isn't all that interesting. At least the game has WiFi capabilities that give it the potential for more fun and different things to do.

The sound is completely forgettable.

Wanting to collect all of the Spectrobes and watch them evolve is the only thing that has kept me even vaguely interested in this game. It is almost a shame that something with so much potential fails to carry it to anything like it's full potential. This had the potential to be a great new series and was different enough from other monster collection games to be called original. It even had good graphics and high production values. At the end of the day, I just can't recommend it.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 03/14/07