Pokemon Battle Revolution

The word revolution evokes a sense of grand, ferocious clashes, rampant change, and the words, "Let them eat cake!"

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The word revolution evokes a sense of grand, ferocious clashes, rampant change, and the words, "Let them eat cake!" When it comes to the first Pokemon entry on the Wii these words ring true, but the cake I was eating is filled with sawdust and mould.

Pros

  • Battling Pokemon in 3-D, going online to challenge friends

Cons

  • Repetitive soundtrack, no content outside of the battles

Bottom Line

If you're not a true Pokemon fan this really is one piece of cake easily left uneaten.

Would you buy this?

  • Where to buy

    Selling at 1 store

Pokemon Battle Revolution is all that I feared it would be: nothing more than battle after exhausting battle. And though these mind numbing conflicts are rendered beautifully, the sugary frosting that would have made the experience exceptional has been completely scraped off.

The Revolution is Nigh

The best thing to be said for Battle Revolution is that it fulfils its promise of providing brawling Pokemon in giant arenas. But after raising my Pokemon for countless hours on the DS, I looked forward to something more than merely uploading them to the Wii and pitting them against other trainers. The technical aspect of transferring my Pokemon was painless, but once they were there, I found little to do with them.

The game is visually stunning, and for the first time your Pokemon is more than a giant polygon with a Pikachu outfit wrapped around it. Despite the graphical appeal, the battle animation contains no sense of action. As in past Pokemon iterations--like Stadium on the N64--your Pokemon don't really make contact with their opponents, and attacks amount to no more than scratch marks across the screen.

I would be ok with this romp through the status quo if there was additional content to keep me and my Pokemon busy on the island of Utopianism. Regrettably, there are no mini-games and the only truly new content is the ability to battle trainers on-line, but even this cannot rescue the game from its mediocrity.

A Whole New World Left Unexplored

The biggest problem with the online content is there are no leader boards, or any other sort of reward for toiling through all of the battles, and it seems there is so much potential here that has been left unexplored. If I could battle up through the ranks, maybe even become a gym leader, and truly become the best Pokemon trainer in the world, then it would be hard to walk away from the opportunity to go online with my Poke-crew.

Getting online is easy, as is setting up a battle, though it can be tedious waiting for an opponent to join for a random battle. However, I often found myself wondering why I was battling at all. I'm OK with the fact that my Pokemon don't level in Revolution, but I just needed to have a solid reason for why I was going though the effort of playing on the Wii when the experience of playing Pokemon on the DS is so great.

If you don't own Diamond or Pearl, there is little reason to pick this title up. There are Pokemon to rent in the game, so it's not mandatory to have the DS version, but there is little appeal to using them. If I had to go through the entire game without my own Pokemon, the repetitive soundtrack would have driven me crazier than it already had. The controls are solid, though there is little interactivity, and at times, I felt so far from the action that I found myself nearly falling asleep. Revolution is polished graphically, and great at what it is. Unfortunately, it is nothing more than a turn-based battle game.

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