Pokémon Sword
image: Game Freak, IGDB

Pokémon Sword & Shield – Switch Review: 2:2

After a long and controversial wait, the new Pokémon games are out. Pokémon Sword and Shield are set in a region close to our own UK, and it is the first mainline, home console Pokémon game – there was a lot riding on it, but does it deliver? Sadly, only to an extent. Sword and Shield are good, but they ought to have been much better.

In the game, you play as a young trainer ready to enter the Galarian gym challenge, spurred on by the encouragement of your neighbour and rival Hop. You receive an endorsement from the undefeated champion Leon (who also happens to be Hop’s older brother) and encounter a mysterious creature in the nearby Slumbering Weald, before setting off on your quest. On the way, you encounter two other rivals, the friendly Marnie and the antagonistic Bede, and help the Pokémon researcher Sonia figure out the secrets of Galar.

Pokémon Sword and Shield play much like any other Pokémon game, although there has been a considerable focus on streamlining and making the experience a little easier for newcomers. It was wonderful, as an old hand, to be able to actually skip tutorials for once, as an example, and there is far more flexibility with the move tutors, encouraging experimentation like never before. The mandatory new mechanic is Dynamax, in which a Pokemon grows incredibly large and its stats increase for three turns – the caveat is that you can only use it once a match. It is fun to begin with, and it encourages a bit more tactical thinking, but the way it is used by the gym leaders is so predictable, it almost becomes a slog.

I could not go through this review without mentioning the National Dex controversy and, if I am honest, I cannot claim that it particularly affected my playthrough. There are a huge variety of Pokémon available almost immediately, meaning you can create a varied team within the first couple of hours, and there are a good number of new creatures (although some are a lot better than others, and some – like Eiscue, a penguin with an ice cube on its head – are the things of nightmares). I will admit to being a little sad that literally all of my favourites did not make the cut, but it forced me to try new Pokémon.

The rest of the game feels so prescriptive and under-developed

One of the game’s most-hyped new features is one of its best – a large part of the Galar region is made up of the Wild Area, an open-world space which you can explore and find a huge variety of wild Pokémon. The feeling of seeing so many wild Pokémon in an open-world space is magical, and a huge step forward for the franchise, and it makes you long for a game built like this. Significantly, there are Pokémon of all levels here (gym badges now cap the level of Pokémon you can catch), and having them in open view – rather than being hidden away through plot machinations – helps build a world. You can tackle them if you wish, and it subtly encourages you to want to level up so you can fight and catch them.

Perhaps it is because the Wild Area is so expansive, but the rest of the game feels so prescriptive and under-developed, with little else to go and see. Compared to previous games, there’s not that much in any of the towns, and some of the routes you explore (although visually beautiful) are essentially just fancy tunnels to get you from one point to the next. The narrative focus on the gym challenge means that most towns are built around their gyms – in two cases, you really have nothing to do but face the gyms, and that is a shame. I do not mean to be picky but, when you visit a town and the gym is the only thing there, it diffuses the sense of place that Pokémon games are normally so good at creating.

I also found this to be an issue in the story, which is very forceful in telling you where to go and what to do, heavily cutting down on the sense of exploration. The gym leaders (given their importance) are developed as characters, but the player is not – throughout much of the story, as issues arise, you are told to leave it to others to deal with, and that means you don’t have a sense of what’s going on. The evil team come and go and a villain feels tacked on, but there is little investment besides getting your gym badges – something that the games force you to do by blocking off all other options. We have some fascinating new characters, like Marnie, Bede and Sonia, and yet they feel so under-utilised because you do not really engage with them in a meaningful way.

Of course, a story does not always matter in Pokémon but, here, there is too little content otherwise for it to not be developed fully. Unless you are particularly bothered by exploring the Wild Area, there is not much to do – this is not helped by the fact that Pokémon Sword and Shield have one of the emptiest post-games in the franchise. Before the game’s release, fans were genuinely excited about the Switch’s power offering the possibility of other regions, or a hugely expansive post-game – for it to amount to a couple of extra Dynamax battles and the Battle Tower is a bit of a shame.

It is hard to ignore the feeling that there is so much promise here

This review probably sounds overly negative, and that is not my intention – I had good fun playing the game, forming a new team and exploring Galar, and I am sure that anyone who plays Sword and Shield will do too. But it is hard to ignore the feeling that there is so much promise here, and that Game Freak has not really managed to deliver on it. New fans will love it but, if you have played a Pokémon game before, you may find yourself thinking about what could have been. I would still recommend Pokémon Sword and Shield, but it does not do enough new and well to not also underwhelm.

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