The game gives you enough gems to build exactly TWO of any deck you want. After that you will never get enough UR crafting material to build another deck ever again. HOPE I LIKE TRAINS.

When the cards smash onto the board and make the loud noise, I like that, that's a good thing. The menu navigation is slow though, and that's bad considering it's half the game.

The solo mode is useless. Give me gems for doing solo mode you clowns. I have become a gremlin for gems and will settle for nothing less.

The online matchmaking is good but it FEELS bad...like morally. There's returning players in the lower ranks trying to run vanilla beat down. Bro I pulled an AccessCode Talker in my second pack you can't be normal summoning Vorse Raider and passing in 2022.

That's about it. The game is terrible. 4 stars.

Update: You can get gems from solo mode. Not too many but enough to build a few more guys. I wish this game was worse, I feel a hopeless addiction growing on me.

I think this game has convinced me that I just don’t like Pokemon games anymore.

I went into this game with pretty high hopes. My gripes with more recent Pokemon games has been a shift away from expression through catching Pokemon and building your team in favor of weirdly grand and linear plots, forced legendaries, and hollow gimmicks that no one cares about. But everything from the gameplay trailers for this game made it seem like it could be great, potentially my favorite Pokemon game ever.

It was a remake of gen 4 which I enjoyed, I liked the aesthetic, and it had all the good roleplaying aspects of past games: clothes and following Pokemon.

At first it was everything I wanted. The grand underground in particular is very enjoyable to explore. It was doing everything right but at some point between two towns it dawned on me. Pokemon is not fun.

The actual gameplay part of this game is just not engaging. What’s the core loop of this game? You go from one town to the next fighting trainers that are 10 levels too weak and running away from wild Pokemon that are 20 levels too weak. There’s very little actual thought, I’m just mashing the A button so my starter can sweep the opponent with their strongest attack. Then the game tasks you to go through a building of Team Galactic baddies and fight the same 3 pokemon 5 times over. This is tedious, this is exhausting.

Catching Pokemon is a chore. Constantly catching or breeding guys until you catch the one with the right nature and ability is a nothing experience. Early in the game you can get a Machop and I’m not going to settle for one that doesn’t have an adamant nature. So on route 207 I have a 35% chance of running into the guy and a 3.3% chance of it being adamant. That’s around a 1 in 100 chance. If I wanted a specific ability it becomes a 1 in 200. That is not fun. I am not having fun. I caught like 60 and gave up. If I didn’t know about natures this would maybe be alright but I do and it’s a cancer on my brain. To steal a quote from Steeb, “the fact that I know so much about Pokemon’s mechanics is an active detriment to the play experience.”

All of this can be mitigated with held items and breeding but that’s all end game stuff. It is very strange to me that it’s just accepted that the main game is just not fun and you only get to have fun once you reach the battle tower in the post-game.

(DISCLAIMER: Now this part sucks because it is dumb to tell anyone how to make a game as a person who does not make a game but here it is anyways)

The solution to this seems so easy. They have all the tools at their disposal to create two game modes. You have this core experience of non-engaging early game combat. That’s what Pokemon is so you don’t want to get rid of that. Call it Classic mode.

Then just make another mode called Battle Tower Mode or something. Random encounters levels scale like they do in the grand underground, random trainers have competent teams, trainers in gyms and gym leaders scale your Pokemons level like they do in the battle tower. Since random trainers are harder you can have them give you potions along with money. Maybe the bad guy trainers don’t give you potions. Maybe the stores sell good held items.

Changing natures should be free, easy, and immediate. Make it so you can give a Pokemon to your Mom and tell her how to take care of them. Tell her to feed him sour food and be strict. Go one screen over and one screen back, grab him from your Mom, and now the Pokemon is adamant.

IVs should just not be a thing, max all IVs for everyone. I guess you can keep EVs but make it easier to remove them. Like a milkshake that just removes all EVs from one stat.

That’s it. I have solved Pokemon.

All the complaining aside, I did finish the game. I don't think a Pokemon game is capable of being below 3 stars. The core idea and world is just too good, but these games have so much more potential not being explored.

Also why do I have to beat the game before you let me catch like 50% of the species. Who does this serve?? Oh god I have to stop typing about Pokemon I could literally go on forever.

Really cool game. It has the architectural horror that I love great deal in Control and a museum is a particularly good setting. The big puzzle rooms very intentionally exist to be be video game puzzle rooms but the context of a museum makes them kind of believable. Then you get some of the larger art pieces that spruce up the hallways between the bigger rooms and they are genuinely fun to just stand and stare at. The characters and their interactions are really enjoyable. I think Mary is a sweet heart and I for one forgive her for her crimes against humanity.

Game clocks in at like 3 hours and that might be the best thing about it cause good lord who has the time to play video games still.

A deeply mid experience. The drilling is fun for a level or two but it becomes very clear that this core mechanic does not have the mechanical depth needed to even carry it through its 4 worlds and sub 2 hour run time. It's pretty satisfying to go into the dirt and pop out once or twice but the areas you can dig really hinder the level design. They are essentially just linear lines. You go in one end of dirt and navigate your way to the other end. This then gets combined with a grapple hook that feels truly awful to use and the cannons from Donkey Kong Country. These cannons felt like archaic game design in the 90s and here they are now in the year of our Lord 2024. I mean I love stickerbrush symphony as much as the next guy but the cannons in this game don't even require you to aim or time your shot like 90% of the time.

Then whatever momentum you can muster is stunted by the constant stop and start of looking for these dumb collectibles which I would love to ignore but they literally lock levels behind collecting them. So many of them are hidden behind walls or off screen that it forces you to crawl through levels scanning every wall for subtle cracks. Their inclusion is in complete opposition to the core appeal of the game.

Idk, the girl looks cute and I assume the fine folks worked hard on the game, but this game was just so frustrating to play. I feel a lot of love put into it but not a lot of thought.

On rainy days in elementary school we would play board games for recess. One of the games was one of those two stick mazes with holes. You'd move the maze around, twist and turn the whole 3D space, and try to navigate the metal ball paste holes and to the finish. It was really fun and a lot of kids would watch and take turns. A real spectator sport.

This game really brought me back there. Played it at a bar for a while with "the boyz" and we were absolutely shrieking with delight advancing very slowly up the board.

Very cool tactile feel. It's definitely skill based and you can feel yourself getting better. The aesthetic with the cabinet art and the beer sliding theme is neat and frames the whole package.

If you see one of these at an arcade or bar definitely feed it a few quarters. It's neato.

This game overall is just kind of alright. You just cheese the luck stat and then you win. The story is mostly harmless. Doesn't really excel at any point but isn't offensive either.

Putting all of that aside though; now that it's nearly a decade old.

Does this game have the best video game box art...like ever? I don't know. I remember thinking at the time and still thinking now that the art on this sucker was just real good. I guess my biggest complaint is that the game itself wasn't as good as its iconic box art.

I had to google what the difference between a rogue-lite and a rogue-like was. They probably teach this in elementary school now and it's not new information for most but the key difference I see is that rogue-lites have "out of run progression". Which Vampire Survivors definitely does have and I do appreciate. The lack of permanent progression is why I normally avoid the genre. They are always fun but I can never imagine myself giving one of these games more than 4 stars and I have sickness in me that needs every game I play to be my potentially new favorite game ever. And looky there, 4 stars. I liked seeing all the madness and flashing colors, I liked having a game I could play with one hand while listening to an audiobook. I logged a quick and casual 30 hours in like a week and I think that's kinda fucked up.

The first three stages are very detailed and fun to play.

The last one is also fun but a bit cornballs. A little too on the nose and when the NPCs start walking around the jankiness of it all kind of takes away from the overall experience.

The additional gidgets and gadgets are great.