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Pokemon Pocket, Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket, and Pokemon TCG Pocket are all the same game, so let the trainer within you breathe a sigh of relief. We have one suggestion that we think might improve things, but beyond that it’s been a strong, even generous offering here at the start.
The most bizarre aspect of it, although I think I understand the basic concept, is that the game has no… game, at first. On install, you have no access to what we would call the Pokemon TCG – a legendary, road-tested design that still has a ton of life in it. Gabriel literally uninstalled the game before he unlocked it, thinking that it was a card collection app, which is essentially correct until you reach Level Three.
In the same way I can’t imagine painting an entire army just so I can have a painted army, there are people who collect cards of various kinds just to collect them and I can’t explain that either. But if you were to collect cards, the kind of card I can understand the most is Pokemon cards. They have lots of cool creatures on them, which seems like a good property for a card to have. I think there might be a person who “plays” this app purely to collect cards, and to that end the game does absolutely everything it can to support that kind of play. You can make little “displays” for your favorite cards. You can make little binders and stuff. The legible layout, everything. If you want to treasure these cards, and never touch the game proper, this is that app also.
For those familiar with the potent game underneath all these cards, it’s more or less the one you know with a couple twists. First, as is common in new-school TCG designs, Energy – their equivalent of typed mana – is just generated by the game and scales with the current round. It’s not something you need to put into your deck in some optimal ratio, it’s simply an emergent property of playing the game. It’s not always the energy type you want so that is still bound up in the arc of the game, what we used to call the Energy Crisis. This also means that building a deck is just about choosing your twenty cards, another fairly modern conceit.
The play experience is refined, beyond clean. The first couple games I’m confident were against children, and one may have been against a zygote of some kind. I played long enough to find the rough neighborhood; I barely made it out alive. Inside these cute cards is a bloodthirsty battle engine; the art is a ruse. Some of these voles belong in actual jail.
(CW)TB out.