| Game Reviews From a Parental Perspective! | |
|
|
|
| Home | Forums | Review Archive | Columns | Feature Articles |
|
Home >
Review Archive >
Video Games
> Results: Spectrobes
Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us | Buy This Game Scroll down for our Kid Factor. 
The ESRB Says
Fantasy Violence:GamerDad used his spectrobes to destroy many Krawl in bloodless battles. Critical Portion: Spectrobes has been compared to Pokemon quite a bit, and it is easy to see why - you find and 'awaken' youthful spectrobes, and by evolving them they become more useful and stronger in battle. Your own attacks are relatively useless most of the time, it is about managing your roster of spectrobes to ensure success in battle. The game is huge and the graphics and sounds are very well done, and the first hour or two are loads of great gaming. Spectrobes features a system for hunting artifacts, a stylus minigame for unearthing them once found, a microphone game to awaken the Spectrobes from their fossils and other nice touches. But I have some very mixed feelings about the game - my kids LOVE this game and I can completely understand why, because their play time allotment and interest in maximizing the number of games they get to play means not playing any one game for an extended period. This play style accentuates the positive - fun battles, exploration, mini-games and all those cute Spectrobes! But playing the game full-on the way I do - longer sessions, dedicated in the pursuit of the conclusion - is a very different experience. The first couple of hours are great, but imagine having to manually explore every inch of territory looking for hidden stuff - that is what you do in Spectrobes, then you move to a new planet and do the same thing. The digging and waking and evolving sequences are nicely done and fun - by by the 1000th time you've done them they cease to be fun. The battle system is not much better in that regard - they have really great special powers with great effects, but the battles devolve into running around charging up those special attacks. And given the huge scope of the game, and the disproportionate cost of things compared to battle rewards, you will be forced to take almost every fight you encounter. After dumping dozens of hours into the game I can see ways that they could have made it less repetitive and more fun, but watching my kids revel in things I find boring reminds me that there is a very specific target audience for this game. That is the real criteria I would use for this game - if your kids love the Pokemon GBA games they will likely enjoy this quite a bit. But while those are truly excellent games with strategy and depth for gamers of any age, this is much more repetitive and will not have a long life for gamers outside of the target audience.  
The themes of this game are dedication, patience and working together. These are reinforced often since you play the impatient and somewhat reckless Rallen who is constantly being reined in due to his penchant for drifting off focus. Kids identify with him because he reminds them of so many of their cartoon heroes. There are hundreds of variants of Spectrobes to find during the game, and kids will love finding as many as they can and giving them funny names and evolving them. The designs of the creatures are colorful and fun to look at, many of them seem particularly silly and give the kids a laugh. The battles are less strategic than Pokemon, but my kids liked triggering the special attacks - yet they also commented on how silly the battles seemed at times. Nothing they encounter is violent or scary or graphic beyond what any kid capable of picking up a DS can handle.
Comments? Chat about it in our forums! Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us | Buy This Game Home > Review Archive > Video Games > Results: Spectrobes |
Read the GamerDad 2007 Holiday Guide!
|
Please Note: GamerDad is not intended to be read by anyone under 18. We stay clean, but be warned! Content Management System developed by Redbird Solutions. |
