Spectrobes: The first 15 minutes

There's an unspoken rule-of-thumb among game journalists that within a couple of minutes of playing a game, subconsciously you've already decided what review score you'll award. Occasionally you'll change your mind, but very often your initial hunch proves correct 12 hours of sore thumbs later.

That's why we love to get our hands on games. Even if we only play a snippet, it's usually enough to give us an excellent idea of how the finished product will turn out.

And that was the reason – not the free champagne or the swanky party at the Natural History Museum (check out our photos) – that we were pleased to get an invite to the press event for Disney's big DS game Spectrobes.

As dutiful Pocket Gamer readers will know, we first came across the game during E3 2006, and we liked it then. At the press launch, however, our focus was playing through the first 30 minutes.

Cue part one: the first 15 minutes

The game starts off by introducing the two main characters – a headstrong young Planetary Patrol Officer called Rallen, and his sidekick Jeena. They've got a typical love-hate relationship, which feeds into the gameplay of the first mission.

You play as Rallen, who's sent to investigate a strange object on a planet. Jeena, who remains in the spaceship, acts as your guide, making sure you know what you're supposed to be doing and giving nagging hints when you do the wrong thing.

The game is very Japanese in style, with the character interactions displayed through static 2D sprite artwork and big speech bubbles. Indeed, it felt a bit like the DS lawyer sim Phoenix Wright.

The Japanese flavour is not surprising though, as the game is the work of Jupiter Corporation, a Tokyo-based company that's previously worked with Disney on handheld games such as Disney Sports Motocross and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories.

Starting our exploration on the planet, both the DS' top and bottom screens displayed a good-looking 3D environment. Movement is controlled using the D-pad, and it wasn't long before we wandered across a mysterious object – a capsule with an old man inside.

Before we could investigate further, however, a black vortex spun into view and launched us into the 3D battle screen.

This screen is displayed on the bottom DS screen – with stats on the top – and in our case showed Rallen and his two spectrobes. As the story explains, in finding the capsule, Rallen also found a wristband called a Prizmod. This can contain up to six spectrobes creatures, two which can be selected for battle.

The only two spectrobes available to us were Spikan, a strong attacking beast with a spiky tail, and Zozane, who is more of a fast moving creature.

Together we were battling against three other creatures, known collectively in the game as the Krawl. You trigger your spectrobes to attack using the DS' left and right shoulder buttons. Other options included a weak punch attack from Rallen via the 'X' button and various charge attacks using the 'A', 'B' and 'Y' buttons (these change during the game depending on the weapons and spectrobes you have equipped).

Every time you attack (or get hit), the amount of damage inflicted is displayed as floating red numbers in typical role-playing game style.

Seeing off the bad guys was quite easy – this was the first battle in the game – and victory meant our team got experience points to start the levelling up process, as well as some in-game currency, called Gura.

That over, we could wake up the old man, who explained about the Prizmod and the Krawl. Taking him back to our spaceship, we found out his name was Aldous. A scientist, he was trying to collect spectrobes to stop the Krawl destroying his home planet. Clearly he'd failed...

So that was the first 15 minutes. But we've got so much more to tell you, so come back to check out tomorrow's Spectrobes article for the heads up on how to use the Lab System to awaken the spectrobes you get to dig out the ground, as well as more juicy details about the various species you'll encounter in the game that's clearly taking on the mighty Pokemon.

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