I just want to start out by saying that even though I stopped playing this game, I did enjoy it for the most part. For one, I really enjoyed Tandor as a region. Most of the different areas, while still fitting within the normal Pokémon area archetypes, felt a bit more interesting and detailed than they usually do. I also appreciated the increased emphasis on story and all the references to the Pokémon Ranger series (great spin-offs, those).

It's unfortunate, then, that the game is plagued by a bit of a balancing issue. I was already underleveled pretty early on, but by the time I finished the 6th gym, for which I had to grind my starter like 7 levels just to beat, I saw that the next gym jumped a whole 10 levels, and my patience kind of wore out. By the time I had reached that point, it already felt like the game should've ended about 5 hours ago, so realizing I would have to spend another 5 hours or so just grinding, without even progressing the story, kind of caused me to lose interest. Honestly if this game was better balanced, I'd probably have rated it a 4/5 and said it was better than all the mainline games currently on Switch (honestly it still kind of is but that's besides the point) but a game has to either be really special or have an extremely streamlined combat system to make me put up with grinding that much, and Pokémon Uranium unfortunately doesn't quite reach either qualification.