So after a couple of hours with Invizimals I'm not impressed. The game basically has two halves, capturing Invizimals through silly AR games and then fighting them in a relatively simple combat system.



The AR games aren't too bad and actually kind of sorta enjoyable (something that would amuse a young kid, so they do their job) and they work fine! For example, that Face Raiders game in the 3DS where you have to dodge shots, one of the levels is like that, and it works really well if you have a good surface. But they're proceeded by these annoying as fuck minigames where you have to chase the Invizimals down by "following" them which means literally walking to find your target, and sometimes even in extremely good lighting conditions the game will want you to walk through walls. And you can be asked to do these sections three times in a row, so if the camera decides that it wants you to walk through a wall, you're screwed and have to do it all over again. Sometimes I've broken into a full on sprint down a hallway to keep up with an Invizimal and I've still managed to fail to keep up with it. Really. Fucking. Frustrating.



The second half is a battle system of sorts. You're put into an arena with 1v1, 1v3 or 2v2 set of battles, with direct control assigned to you. You press a button to use an attack, and if you press it again at a good time, it makes the attack more powerful. Unfortunately, the AI is a big fat cheater. Every attack can stunlock you, but you can't stunlock any enemy anywhere near as easy. Not to mention they can dodge most attacks (the timing to dodge attacks for your Invizimal is REALLY fucked up). And some enemies have cross-arena attacks. That hit immediately.



I'm going to put this into it's own line just so you realise how stupid this mechanic is.



INSTANTANEOUS. UNDODGEABLE. STUNLOCKING. CROSS-ARENA. ATTACK. THAT ONLY THE AI CAN USE EFFECTIVELY.



It gets relatively worse too, especially when you have to take on 3 enemies at once. Even if you're ten or so levels above (for reference, the level cap is 30 [from what I can figure out]) an enemy, every attack will stunlock you. So when the game decides to put you in a 3-on-1 fight, you're stunlocked immediately, and the AI will juggle you back and forth until ALL of your HP is gone. That reminds me of stats actually - when you level up sucessfully, you can up your Invizimals stats, but nowhere in the game or the manual does it explain what any of the stats do. While 3 of the 5 are relatively guessable (health, stamina and defense) there are two stats named Attack and Strength which I cannot for the life of me figure out how they differ from eachother. And I'm a 20-year old who's relatively RPG-savvy, I can't imagine how a kid's supposed to figure this out.



So yeah, Invizimals should be one to avoid.



I want Gundam Breaker.



EDIT: Almost forgot to mention, the game includes a second set of the default pack of AR cards. Except they're twice as flimsy because they're half the thickness of the normal ones. And yet they glare less so they're more useful in sunny environments. How odd it takes one step back, and one step forward.