Pokémon Quest
Year: 2018
Rating: E
Time Played: 105+ hours
There are a lot of games I play that are part of the free-to-play structure. Pokémon Quest was one of them. I say was here because there really was no motivation to complete the Pokémon series slogan of catching them all without finally giving in and paying for the items needed to make grinding for these rare Pokémon much easier. If I had given in and paid for the necessary items to make the game completable, I’d be spending nearly $30, and this is not a $30 game. When a game can play itself without player input, it’s hardly even a game.
Presented in a pixelated Minecraft style, Pokémon Quest is probably closest to the Rumble side series of Pokémon games. With a few limited moves, the Pokémon you play with in this game are sent into different biomes to take down the Pokémon that live there. While there is some amount of strategy for how you set up your team of three Pokémon so that you can let the game play on automatic mode without your Pokémon fainting, once you have the META figured out, it basically plays itself. Often, I’d start a round while watching a TV show, only occasionally glancing down to confirm that the level was complete.
There were times near the late stages of the game when it was legitimately fun, and the challenge was enough for me to take control of my Pokémon for a few levels. Still, the main “capture” mechanic for this game was too random for my tastes. Cooking food in your camp that would attract Pokémon based on the ingredients never felt like something I could control to get what I wanted. Instead, I had to pay for the ability to speed this process up or run it in parallel with multiple pots of food. Since I refused to do so, my Pokédex remains incomplete, even if all the levels were defeated.
A somewhat fun free-to-play game that is not worth the $30 it tries to get you to spend, I give Pokémon Quest 3.0 stars out of 5.
