I’m going to keep my talk of Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals a bit shorter since I need to run off and see the guys at SouthPeak, but if you played the first game (as a large chunk of the population did evidently) then you know what’s going on here. You collect creatures, battle with them and then save the world. The game has been totally revamped though. The top-down view of the first game is gone and replaced with a 3D world in which the lead character can fight and explore. Many of the same characters are returning with some new ones and the adventure is all new.

Battles are totally different now. You have two fight modes. One where you’re attacking basic creatures as the lead, and the other where you enter a vortex scattered around the gameworld in order to attack with your evolved Spectrobes. These fights are all in real-time, so you’re controlling one of two Spectrobes movements and attacks while the computer controls the other. Switch between the two and pull off special moves well to win any battle.

The game has doubled in size from the first one and fans of collecting all the Spectrobes will be happy to hear that the amount of the little creatures has done the same. The discovery and excavating of the creatures is basically the same from what I saw with a few tweaks to make the game more playable and easy to interface with. This is a major revamp for the series which game creator Kentaro Hirai said was done in order to make the Spectrobes more interactive and give them more character depth. As a whole, the developers seem to have diverged enough from that last game’s formula to offer up some new stuff and make it look less like Pokemon than it did before. Doesn’t mean it’s any better though.