A couple months ago, Nintendo rolled out their first freemium Pokémon game for 3DS, Pokémon Shuffle. I’m told that it’s the average mobile F2P match-em-up, but with Squirtles and Lucarios instead of candy beans or whatever. I played the crap out of it, in fact I continue to play a little bit each day, and I still haven’t spent a single cent on it. It helps that it is fairly regularly updated with new content and competitions.
Last week, the second free-to-play Pokémon spinoff came out: Pokémon Rumble World. Like the previous games in the Rumble series, it’s a fairly shallow action game that has you punch your way through scores of toy Pokémon and hoping to maybe take some home with you at the end of each stage. It’s good, simple fun, and World is the best incarnation of it yet.
For starters, it’s not the “keep giving us money and we’ll let you play more than five rounds a day” kind of F2P model. No, it’s more like you get the game for free, and then you can give up some bucks to unlock more content within it. And that content is all either permanent upgrades or new stages, too. Also, there’s a hard limit on how much money you can spend on the game (about $35), so it’s more like you’re buying a full game bit-by-bit instead of paying it all up front.
This is a pretty great model. Especially since the premium currency (pokédiamonds) are easy enough to come by for free in-game. There are daily challenges that reward skilled players with pretty decent payouts of pokédiamonds, streetpass milestones that award bunches of pokédiamonds, and if you streetpass people or have 3DS friends that are playing the game, their Miis can pop in and sometimes give you a diamond.
So there are two way you can play: take it slow and unlock everything for free, or pony up and have all of the game’s content delivered to you as soon as possible. Not too shabby. If you hit the spending limit, the game even gives you 20 free pokédiamonds every day to fritter away on the usual silly freemium things, like reviving if you’re defeated in a stage, or being able to play a stage again without waiting for the time limit to expire.
The only thing I really don’t like about Rumble World is that adding a specific monster to your stable requires a massive amount of luck. For one, simply getting a defeated Pokémon to join you is random, nothing you can really do about it. Not every Pokémon assigned to a stage appears every time you play that stage, which complicates things further. Worst of all, each world is divided into several areas, each with a pre-set Pokémon loadout, and you get to play one stage per visit to a world, and even then it’s picked randomly.
Certain Pokémon seem to only appear in the “FEVER!” version of each stage, which, as far as I can tell, comes about totally randomly. Like everything else. Needless to say, there are a lot of RNGs working against you if you’re trying to catch ’em all. It’s very much a “hope for the best” kind of situation.
On the upside, it’s still pretty fun to just carve your way through the stages, bopping Pokémon left and right. The way that the game mechanics and pokémon moves and strength levels work, it gives you lots of opportunities to play as monsters that otherwise amount to useless data. For example, I’ve been playing as a really strong Durant lately, and Durant is a Pokémon that has gotten exactly zero respect from me previous to this game. I use it because it’s quick, strong, and has a really efficient Bite attack. Contrast with Golbat, a Pokémon I normally love, but whose Acrobatics attack is really unwieldy in Rumble World, making it difficult to use effectively.
Certainly, Pokémon Rumble World is not a deep game, but it’s a decent way to kill some time now and then. And who doesn’t love the adorable little toy versions of Pokémon? So yeah, I’d recommend it. Besides, it’s free. What do you have to lose?