Capsule Review: Pokémon Quest
A streamlined Pokémon collection and combat game. Take your team of up to three Pokémon on “expeditions” where they automatically walk around, encounter other Pokémon, and automatically fight them in real time. Your only direct control is that you can manually trigger their abilities (which then have cooldowns before they can be used again), but you can’t target them, so you might as well just put them on auto. Successful expeditions result in experience gains and two types of item drops - Power Stones, which are basically equipment for Pokémon that boost stats or improve abilities, and cooking ingredients. Cooking is how you recruit new Pokémon via themed recipes - use a lot of blue ingredients if you want to recruit a blue Pokémon, for example.
There are a few other elements such as decorations for your base camp, but that’s the game’s main loop. Send out Pokémon to level them up and get drops, recruit new Pokémon to fill out your Pokédex; rinse and repeat. It’s a very cute game, and collecting Pokémon is often appealing, but there’s just not enough to the core experience here. There isn’t enough control over combat for it to really be an action RPG, but even if you leave it completely on auto you still have to wait for it to play out. You can’t just send Pokémon out and then check in later, so it doesn’t work as an idle game either. It requires time and attention but doesn’t provide engaging gameplay.
I Stopped Playing When: After having done the tutorials plus a few self-driven expeditions, the lack of control over combat that you’re still forced to sit through convinced me that the game was too dull to bother with.
One Star: Not for me. While there might be someone out there who'd enjoy this game, I was actively repulsed by it or just found nothing to latch on to.