Pokerogue's biggest success in how addictive it is. It's so simple to just be hooked on trying to plan out a team based on the couple of members that have dropped, scout out ones to catch, try to catch a few more in order to get ideal IV's to bolster your starters with, and just grind out floors until you get that run where everything comes together. It's good like that! It makes great use of music and motifs from throughout the Pokemon series, both rival designs are great, and it allows for an incredibly speedy feeling out process of all sorts of Pokemon species, leveling them up insanely quick to feel a sort of greatest hits version of their growth. That Pokerogue can so effectively tap upon the feeling of wanting to catch 'em all and play with all of them is its greatest strength.
Unfortunately, it doesn't even take a full run for Pokerogue to show its faults. AI is rudimentary to a fault, being able to be easily baited based on type match-ups, effectively randomizing learnsets to the point of inefficiency, and ultimately just can't match up with all of the flexibility a player always has at their fingertips. Though this is really only an issue in the early stages of Pokerogue, when the player is still developing their team. By the game's midway point, five or so of the player's final party has probably been solidified, with one 'weak link' to drop out if they happen to see something better. Moreover, due to the way the battles are spread out as an endurance gauntlet, the same types of Pokemon are gonna end up being far more valuable. Whilst you could imagine a player picking up and bonding with whatever weirdos they happen to stumble onto and making some kinda grand narrative, the game is really only suited for two kinds of Pokemon: fast attackers and walls with a lot of resistances. Pokemon like Excadrill leap out to being so ridiculously good in this kind of format, it's almost a punishment to NOT have one on your team, and that goes doubly for any fast set-up sweepers. As the enemy loves to load its opposing trainers with Lum Berries, and it costs less to not get hit at all than to tank hits well, stall or status strategies are incredibly unreliable, inherently removing the usefulness of a littany of Pokemon. Pokerogue, ultimately, is a game where your run is successful because of one Pokemon who hits things really hard, a couple of switch-ins to bait that Pokemon's bad match-ups, and then the rest of your team can be rounded out with whatever losers who'll warm the bench. And considering the sheer length of a full run, they're gonna be warming the bench for a while!
I played way too many browser games as a kid to call PokeRogue bad - if I had THIS in my school's computer lab I definitely would've never played anything else and sacrificed all social time at school to play it. There's an intoxicating, addictive element here that's testing your knowledge of every generation of Pokemon in a massive gauntlet. It's just disappointing that the solution is "load Gardevoir with a bunch of drugs and spoons and then she hits everything with the moon until it dies", or variants thereof. It's an unbalanced but fun little experiment that I hope its devs do more with, but the core conceit of how the project works makes it a bit of a solved equation for me that undercuts the whole feel of Pokemon for me.
Unfortunately, it doesn't even take a full run for Pokerogue to show its faults. AI is rudimentary to a fault, being able to be easily baited based on type match-ups, effectively randomizing learnsets to the point of inefficiency, and ultimately just can't match up with all of the flexibility a player always has at their fingertips. Though this is really only an issue in the early stages of Pokerogue, when the player is still developing their team. By the game's midway point, five or so of the player's final party has probably been solidified, with one 'weak link' to drop out if they happen to see something better. Moreover, due to the way the battles are spread out as an endurance gauntlet, the same types of Pokemon are gonna end up being far more valuable. Whilst you could imagine a player picking up and bonding with whatever weirdos they happen to stumble onto and making some kinda grand narrative, the game is really only suited for two kinds of Pokemon: fast attackers and walls with a lot of resistances. Pokemon like Excadrill leap out to being so ridiculously good in this kind of format, it's almost a punishment to NOT have one on your team, and that goes doubly for any fast set-up sweepers. As the enemy loves to load its opposing trainers with Lum Berries, and it costs less to not get hit at all than to tank hits well, stall or status strategies are incredibly unreliable, inherently removing the usefulness of a littany of Pokemon. Pokerogue, ultimately, is a game where your run is successful because of one Pokemon who hits things really hard, a couple of switch-ins to bait that Pokemon's bad match-ups, and then the rest of your team can be rounded out with whatever losers who'll warm the bench. And considering the sheer length of a full run, they're gonna be warming the bench for a while!
I played way too many browser games as a kid to call PokeRogue bad - if I had THIS in my school's computer lab I definitely would've never played anything else and sacrificed all social time at school to play it. There's an intoxicating, addictive element here that's testing your knowledge of every generation of Pokemon in a massive gauntlet. It's just disappointing that the solution is "load Gardevoir with a bunch of drugs and spoons and then she hits everything with the moon until it dies", or variants thereof. It's an unbalanced but fun little experiment that I hope its devs do more with, but the core conceit of how the project works makes it a bit of a solved equation for me that undercuts the whole feel of Pokemon for me.