FutureFive New Zealand - Consumer technology news & reviews from the future
Story image
Mon, 1st Feb 2010
FYI, this story is more than a year old

If you're familiar with the Pokemon series, then you'll know that the premise of the game is to capture little monsters to battle other trainers and their respective monsters. The PSP takes this form of gameplay to whole a new level, with the player quite literally having to find their own monsters to capture using the PSP's camera. Although this may sound intriguing, it can be quite fiddly trying to locate the monsters. For example, not only do you need to find a flat surface, but you need the right surface colour too. I struggled to find a flat surface that was purple! Not only that; the environment needs to be brightly lit as well.Your goal is to simply capture as many monsters as you can and train them in order to fight other trainers and their monsters. Capturing these monsters can be addictive. You'll literally search high and low in order to capture one of these creatures. My brother thought I looked like an idiot as I was holding my PSP searching for an invizimal around my house. Capturing them can be quite a journey too, as you'll have to undertake many humorous actions in order to do this. One, for example, requires you to tickle his tail, while in another I had to blind the creature with a shining light.Battling the monsters is arguably the weakest aspect of the game. It's like a turn-based RPG game where you have to press one button at a time to either attack or defend.  The structure of the game is very tedious as well. Essentially, you capture a monster and then battle with your monster, rinse and repeat. If you're bored with battling in the single-player campaign, you can opt to play in multiplayer in both ad hoc and online. Invizimals as a game is not as groundbreaking as the hardware it utilises. Overall, it’s one very shallow game. If you're not a fan of the Pokemon series, then I'd suggest that you give this title a miss.