Rating: 8/10
You are a 10 year old from pallet town in the region of Kanto, about to set out on their very own adventure with there Pokémon companion Pikachu or Eevee. Along the way you must battle gym's, defeat trainers and thwart the plans of the devious team rocket as you move ever closer to becoming a Pokémon master and defeating the elite four.
Overview:
My views:
I honestly have trouble rating this game, on the one hand it is just a retelling of the original Pokémon Red and Blue games, which I love, but on the other hand it uses the mechanics made popular by the mobile app game Pokémon Go for catching and raising Pokémon, which gives me a little bit of anxiety.
Not as shallow as it looks
The game is defiantly a hybrid of the classic Pokémon games and the Pokémon Go game with mechanics being blended together to create what is a more casual game. If you are a hardcore Pokémon trainer, which is still an idea I struggle with as these games where originally made for children, but you know the kind of of person who knows about IV's (or is EV's) and will battle a legendary Pokémon and resets the game if it's nature isn't what you want; then I don't think that this game is for you.
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Where the game finds it's depth is in the catching portion of your adventures. Gone are the days where you would catch the first Pidgey you see and then never catch another one, here you will be catching hundreds of the same Pokémon to turn then into specific candies that up one of your Pokémon's particular stat. (i.e. total health or defence etc). Also the game keeps track of the amount of each Pokémon you catch and if you continually catch the same Pokémon again and again without catching another Pokémon you will receive a catch multiplier that will mean you have an increased chance of catching a Shinny version of that Pokémon and the Pokémon will also have better initial Stats.
Talking about catching multipliers these increase the amount of Exp. your Pokémon receive after every catch making it great way to level up your team quickly.
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Now I am glad to report that the battling in lets go is the same as it has always been in the mainline series, which is to say the turn based rock paper scissors style of gameplay that Pokémon series is known for, and although you no longer battle wild Pokémon (you can only throw berries and balls at them, unless they are special encounters). You still have real Pokémon battle with the trainers you find throughout the Kanto region and there are also a couple of times where you get to do double battles which is always fun.
Getting over the world
Another part of the game that really worried me initially is seeing the Pokémon in the overworld, it didn't feel right when I was watching the gameplay videos before it was released and it just made the game feel emptier and that you could now walk through an entire cave structure and not run into a single Zubat, it's just madness. After I got to play it thought turns out that I love being able to avoid Zubats because, although I always have a Crowbat in my team, they are really annoying when your just trying to get to the next town before your last Pokémon faints.
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What Pokémon being in over world does do that has never really been achieved before is giving the Pokémon a true sense of scale, I mean I never knew an Onyx was so big until I played this game. And the game looks so pretty, Kanto has never been so beautiful, gone are the days of 2D sprites and the blocky 3D graphics from the DS era, here everything is smooth and clean like breath of the wild or Mario Odyssey.
My last thoughts
I was definitely apprehensive about this game when it was first announced I didn't like the idea of mixing the mobile go mechanics with the more traditional game play form the mainline Pokémon games but I was very pleasantly surprised with just how well it works. I will say that this doesn't feel like the next generation of Pokémon games just more like a stop gap while we wait for the next one to come but if it looks anything like this and is on the switch then it will probably be a 10/10.
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Until next time... Toby