You can buy a five-move boost at the start of the match, but if you have enough coins, the offer will also pop up at the end of a match when you are looking back on a few minutes all but wasted, and so your resolve is weakened. Shuffle, a reworking of Pokémon Battle Trozei, feels a bit of an afterthought.Ī lot of this mistrust comes down to the way that the microtransactions are employed. In truth, the company's already done it, and with much more class. It's tempting to look at Shuffle as Nintendo dipping a toe into free-to-play. In my own highly limited experience, this stuff makes me inherently mistrust the game, even as the wider game itself seems to suggest that it is actually playing things relatively straight. In Pokémon Shuffle you can pay to tip the balance in your favour: go into battle with an XP boost, or pick up an extra five moves for a fee when you've lost a match. The stages tend not to have nasty spikes, and those Pokéball captures actually seem to go in your favour as often as they don't, even if the meter at the bottom of the screen that measures "catchability" doesn't seem to provide too much real guidance to your overall chances of success. Dropping in and dropping out with long breaks, it would be hard to argue that I was being worked over by Wall Street here. With no time pressure, and playing at a lazy rate, I got to about level 50 before I had to drop any money, and the next £8.09 was enough to get me into the low 80s. On top of this reassuring banality, the free-to-play business model actually seems relatively gentle - as long as you aren't in too much of a hurry. It's the sort of game you might forget you've played while you're playing it. It's not the sort of game you would generally find yourself getting worked up about. Throughout its campaign it offers, if not actual fun, then a gentle kind of distraction, in the same way that it is a gentle kind of distraction to try and guess the four-letter passcode on my digital bus ticket each morning (today's was MOLD). Then it dusts the whole thing with a thin layer of additional complexity, as you choose which of your Pokémon will populate the board in each battle - which Pokémon get to be the game's pieces, in other words - and then aim for a combo landslide and lots of four- or five-piece matches. It takes the Puzzle & Dragons approach to match-three, which means that you can move a piece from anywhere on the board to anywhere else on the board (for your first few minutes with such a forgiving design, you may suspect it's more spot-three than match-three). It's a free-to-play Pokémon-themed match-three puzzler in which you move Pokémon faces around to battle their wild brethren, and, in purely mechanical terms, it's dull but largely semi-competent. Or, you could say, as a gambler.Īnd I appreciate that all of this is a bit weird. More importantly, when I rant about a Pokéball failure in Pokémon Shuffle, I'm not ranting as a trainer. When I'm paying for individual Pokéballs out of the same pot of money I use to buy a sandwich, or settle the electric bill, I take it a lot more personally when one doesn't work. I may have effectively paid real money to have that Pokémon battle, and I may also have paid real money for a special Great Ball with a better than average chance of making the catch once the standard Pokéball has already failed. In Pokémon Shuffle, though, this delicate fiction is compromised. I may rant when a dice roll unexpectedly doesn't go my way, but I rant safely within the fiction of the game: I am a trainer, and that particular Pokémon has gone forever. In a traditional Pokémon game, I am A-okay with this transaction. Sometimes they don't work and the wild Pokémon gets to flee. Sometimes they work and you get to capture a wild Pokémon. One of the weird aspects of money is that it can make things feel cheap. A dull puzzler, undermined by the grasping philosophy behind its business model as much as the actual amount of money it could cost you.Įurogamer has dropped review scores and replaced them with a new recommendation system.
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