Pokemon Rumble Rush is a neat little action RPG where you explore different islands with different sets of Pokemon in order to meet the requirements to get to the next fight and win it in a set time. Your critter mostly moves on its own, but you can dodge and attack by tapping the screen and you get special moves and gear that you can upgrade after a while. I had a good time with it, although it was pretty grindy after a while and I didn’t have much time or patience for that. The upgrade system was a bit meaningless as well, but it’s probably because I couldn’t get too much of the grind.
I’ve played other Pokemon Rumble games before - I think there was one on the wii? - and this one looks and plays like them, they’re simple action RPGs where your pokemons are attacking masses of enemies with simple moves and a very limited number of special attacks. You can tap to attack - or hold to charge up - and swipe to dodge. After a while you get partner attacks that deal big damage that you need to defeat foes to charge up. You deal more or less damage to enemies depending on type differences and levels are just straight lines where you defeat hordes of random pokemons (and get some of them as rewards) until you get to a much stronger boss that is basically a check to see if you can deal enough damage in a small time period.
This becomes really difficult after a while. It’s tough to get the pokemons you want, you can explore wherever you want on a map and you can get ‘hints’ to show you which creatures you’ll get where, but they’ll sometimes only appear a few times and not be captured when you defeat them. Everything about managing your multiple pokemons and gear is also pretty unwieldy - you need to manually release everything and you get a pittance for it. I wish the game would’ve just powered-up your creatures and gears with the duplicates. There are also ore pieces with multi-hour timers, but I always had enough special tickets to make them refine faster, you get money and gear from them, which is useful, but like I said before, I just had too many pieces of gear that didn’t matter much and that just felt superfluous.
Ultimately I stopped playing after a few maps because the game just becomes a big grindy chore. It’s difficult to get stronger creatures - and you NEED them in order to beat stages fast enough. You also reset when you get to a new island, which is a bit of a pain. The game is neat and not too bad with microtransactions, but I just didn’t have enough time to get too far.
