Previews

Hands on with Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals on DS

Have your cake and eat it

Hands on with Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals on DS

There's a famous internet truism, called Godwin's Law, which states that "As a discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one". If Mike Godwin had spent his formative years on GameFAQs rather than Usenet he probably would've amended his law slightly to point out how impossible it is to talk about Spectrobes without almost instantly comparing it to Pokémon.

It's certainly difficult to imagine that the Disney business meeting that spawned the original didn't include the words "Pokémon" and "clone" together in the same sentence, possibly alongside a reference to "easy money". The end result though was a relative triumph, copying little directly from Nintendo's cash cow and featuring vastly higher production values.

Comparing Pokémon Diamond/Pearl to this new sequel almost feels like a form of internet bullying, to the point where one can hardly believe they're on the same system. The 3D graphics in the original were always good but now the game employs an over-the-shoulder view when exploring the various planets and it looks superb. Detailed, atmospheric and as smooth as a well-planed baby's bottom.

The basic gist of the game remains the same as before. You play inexplicably young space police Rallen and Jeena, who seem to waste an inordinate amount of police time digging up fossils of the Pokémon-like spectrobes, raising them as their own and using them to fight interdimensional bad guys.

Once again the artwork for the spectrobes (courtesy of Kingdom Hearts and The World Ends With You developers Jupiter) is truly excellent, even if the DS's low resolution isn't able to make the best of them. After being found as fossils most spectrobes have three evolutionary stages and the youngest are employed to follow you around the game world and act as a sonar for finding more of their buried compatriots. Finding and digging up relics is a little easier than before, but not obviously any more fun as you softly chip away at each one and blow on the microphone to get sand out of the way.

Awakening the fossils also appears largely the same as before, as you're invented to sing, burp or burble into the microphone to stir them into life. The big changes though are in terms of combat, with Rallen and Jeena now able to fight on their own when exploring - employing swords, guns and fisticuffs to battle minor enemies.

Separate battles occur when you enter a tornado-like vortex, where you no longer control a human player at all, but instead one of two previously selected spectrobes. Unlike the original you now control them directly, switching between each whenever you want. The rock-paper-scissors style range of vulnerabilities to different colour types is still in place, but worryingly so too is the fact that you only have one basic attack for each creature. There are combos and special moves, but the combat in general still doesn't seem to offer anything like the depth or strategy of Pokémon.

Nevertheless, it's still hard not to be excited by a game that's had this much tender loving care expended on its presentation and the promise of online battles is an alluring one. Disney did very well with the first Spectrobes and as that rarest of things, a Western publisher willing to make a proper effort on the DS (if only via the proxy of a Japanese developer), they deserve to do at least as well with this when it comes out in the US this autumn and the UK next spring.

Roger  Hargreaves
Roger Hargreaves
After being picked last for PE one too many times, Roger vowed to eschew all physical activities and exist only as a being of pure intellect. However, the thought of a lifetime without video games inspired him to give up and create for himself a new robot body capable of wielding a joystick – as well as the keyboard necessary to write for both Pocket Gamer and Teletext's GameCentral.