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Another game I finished recently, but this one is actually from this year lol.
Summary: New Pokemon Snap is NOT a remake of the original Pokemon Snap, but an entirely new game based on the same concept of the player being a Pokemon photographer. At this point it's also received a free DLC download, which I've also played. Basically you're a young photographer who travels to the Lental Islands to help a professor and his assistants photograph all the Pokemon there for their research. I'd say that mechanically, it's maybe most similar to a rail shooter: your vehicle rides on a set track and you can freely move the camera around to photograph the Pokemon around you. You also earn various items as you go through the game that let you interact with the Pokemon. Compared to the original N64 game, which had only 6 courses and 62 Pokemon plus the secret course with Mew, this game has more than 200 Pokemon and 15 courses (with 3 more in the DLC). And many of those courses have night and day routes, which feature different Pokemon and behaviors on the same course. There's also more to photograph: the original game's Photodex only held one picture of each Pokemon, but in this game each Pokemon has four categories of behavior to get photos for. So there's a TON of content here. I've played about 55 hours so far, and I still haven't gotten every behavior and finished every quest.
Graphics: I love the graphics in this game, they combine the bright, cartoony aesthetic of Pokemon with detailed, sharp graphics. The environments are really detailed and complex, and I haven't noticed any issues with things lagging or not loading in fast enough or anything, it seems to play pretty smoothly. 5/5 for me.
Music: I forgot this category in the previous review...whoops. I would describe the music as...fine, basically? It all works nicely as background music for the courses and it's nice, but there's nothing outstanding or super memorable. But given the style of game, I don't think it NEEDS any outstanding tracks; just pleasant background music is really all that you need here. Aside from the music tracks, the audio direction of the game is quite strong; if you're wearing headphones (or using stereo speakers, I guess) you can hear where Pokemon are around you, which gives a lot of immersion and also makes it easier to find Pokemon that may not be immediately visible. All the little like, rustling leaves, splashing water, whistling wind type environmental noises are solid. So the environmental sound definitely makes the game more immersive AND is useful in gameplay. 4/5 to me.
Gameplay: The gameplay isn't TOO different from the original game: your screen's view is the view of your camera, you press a button to zoom in, you can throw items or activate features with buttons. I like that you can adjust a few things (in particular, you can make the zoom stay on until you press the button again, rather than having to hold down a button; you can also adjust how fast the camera moves in case you get that video game motion sickness). The controls all work fine and nothing feels janky.
BUT I do have a few gripes about some of the mechanics. You get two items you can throw: flufffruits (the equivalent of apples from the first game, I guess they wanted a fantasy name instead?) and Illumina orbs (spheres that make Pokemon light up basically, the plot focuses on researching the Illumina phenomenon). And I just don't like the throwing physics. This isn't a case of a mechanic being broken or whatnot--it works correctly and consistently. I just don't like the implementation that much. The flufffruit just don't throw as far as it feels like they should; the arc is very low, and getting them a decent distance requires angling the throw sharply upwards, which requires you to move the camera such that you can't see what you're throwing at. And sometimes to get specific interactions you need to throw them fairly far from you. I also am not in love with the mechanics of attracting Pokemon with the fluffruit; in the original game this felt slightly smoother (possibly because it was more simple due to being on a less powerful system). It is surprisingly difficult to actually lead Pokemon to a location with fluffruit, and it's hard to tell how close they have to fall to draw the Pokemon's attention. And although in theory throwing additional flufffruit should re-draw the Pokemon's attention, letting you lead it to a location, it feels fiddly; sometimes they just stop and eat the first one, and then they won't do anything else until the eating animation finishes, by which time you may be too far away to get the target interaction. It just feels more fussy than it should, considering that there's a number of quests that require you to lead a Pokemon to a specific spot, which is sometimes a fair distance away. So I just wanted that to be a little smoother.
The Illumina orbs also have some issues; they throw farther, which is nice, but unlike the fluffruit which just need to fall NEAR the Pokemon, the Illumina orb needs to actually make contact with the target. And in addition to Pokemon, you also need to throw them at Crystablooms, which are basically...magic flowers, I guess? And they're fairly small. It frequently feels needlessly difficult to hit the exact spot required to activate them, because the Illumina orbs are ALSO fairly small. Maybe I'm just bad at the throwing mechanics, but they just feel more difficult to use than they need to be. Like, the game itself feels mostly like a puzzle game (figuring out how to get specific Pokemon behaviors), not an action game, so why do I need to master this very precise action. For the Illumina Spot courses, you also frequently need to hit Pokemon with orbs while they're moving, and the physics of that are...frustrating. Particularly the ones where you need to get multiple hits in a row to activate the phenomenon.
In general, although I like that this game has way more Pokemon behaviors to capture, I'm somewhat dissatisfied by a few things. First, it's not totally clear what each category actually is. Some categories require a very specific behavior, but some seem to accept multiple behaviors and the difference between, say category 1 and 2 isn't totally clear to me. And getting specific behaviors sometimes requires very specific sequences of actions which are a bit obscure. I used a guide for some things, and some missions require you to hit a Pokemon with Illumina orbs multiple times, even though you don't get a reaction until the final one, so you have no indication that you should continue. Some missions also seem to only want, like, a specific frame of an animation, so it's not always clear why your photograph didn't fulfill the request. The DLC update also added indicators to the photo review screen showing which photos fulfill a mission, which is excellent and should have been in the base game, given how vague some of the missions are. But in general sometimes the different behaviors and missions just feel a little too obscure and fiddly. And even once you know what to do, for ones that involve throwing items, it can require multiple precise throws (all of which are timed because you can't stop your vehicle) and be frustratingly difficult to actually activate.
Maxing out the research level on each course also has some issues, although this has been mostly fixed by the DLC update. Each course has a research level, and as it increases, more Pokemon appear on the course and engage in different behaviors, so doing this for all courses is important. Pre-DLC, however, your score for each course was based ONLY on photos from that course that went in the Photodex, and since the same Pokemon can appear on multiple courses (and since the day and night versions have separate research levels but share many Pokemon), it was sometimes incredibly difficult to actually max all the levels. Because if you ALREADY got a like, 4500 point photo of a Pokemon on another course, you're not going to be able to just boost that by another 2k. But the DLC changed this to, as far as I can tell (the mechanic is not explicitly described anywhere in-game that I've seen), counting your highest-scoring photo of each Pokemon on that specific course. So even if your photo isn't your highest-scoring EVER, it can still count for that course. There's still 2 or 3 courses I'm struggling to max, but this change made it way easier and also feels more logical.
As mentioned in the summary, the sheer amount of content is a big strength for this game; the original could be completed in a few hours, this has orders of magnitude more content. And again, I haven't even 100% the game, and I ALREADY have 55 hours of gameplay. There's a lot of...not replay value I guess, but just continuing play value, because you can keep trying to get different shots and exploring different interactions. You also have all the online features, which I haven't even tried yet: you can post your photos online and see other people's photos. There's also a photo-editing mechanic, letting you add frames, stickers, filters, etc to your shots to save in your album or post online. So aside from the main focus of completing the photodex, there's also other stuff to play around with, giving you plenty to do.
Overall I'd say 4/5 for mechanics, I do have complaints but they're mostly small, specific things and some of them are my personal taste, not things necessarily wrong. Overall the gameplay is pretty intuitive and fun, there's just a few flaws.
Story: This game doesn't have THAT much of a story, and doesn't need it; it's a game focused on its mechanics basically. But it has more of a story than the original (the story of that game was, in its entirety, "you're a photographer hired to photograph all the Pokemon on this island"). You're researching the Illumina phenomenon and trying to discover the history of the area, and you do learn more with each island you visit. There's also more characters: aside from the professor, there are two child assistants, Rita and Phil, and Todd from the original game makes an appearance as well. They don't do much, but they're fun. The various missions you get are given by the different characters, so I guess that's a fun detail. But yeah this game doesn't need to have a story, and what it has is fun without being intrusive. 5/5.
Technical: I mentioned in this in the last review, but I rarely notice technical issues in games, so don't take this as like, an intensive analysis. But I didn't notice any technical issues. Everything seems to run smoothly, both in docked mode and handheld mode. And I'll add as a side note--I found the game equally playable in both modes. I was worried that in handheld mode the smaller screensize might be an issue, but it actually worked fine. 5/5.
Overall: I really loved Pokemon Snap as a kid and have long hoped that they'd make a new one, so I was inclined to like this game from the start lol. But I really enjoyed it, it captures the joy of the original game but greatly increases the detail and complexity and amount of content. It totally evokes the feeling of going on an adventure and exploring all these natural areas. The DLC is also awesome, aside from the handful of mechanical changes that fixed some issues, the new courses are also excellent. Each one has a day and night version and multiple paths inside the course, so they really are additional full courses. And one is clearly inspired by a course from the original game, which is such a fun reference for fans of the old N64 game. And it was free! This is the model of how DLC should work imo, it actually adds to the game. I would've been willing to pay for it as well, given the amount of content it provides. I'm hoping that maybe they'll be additional DLC going forward...? I'd definitely play it. The one issue with this game is that some of the behaviors and missions are too obscure, and I personally found it sometimes too difficult to hit the intended target with throwable items, but those are pretty small flaws, and heck, nowadays you can just use a guide if you can't solve a specific mission. Would definitely recommend. It's a really relaxing game. 4/5 overall, excellent with a couple flaws.
So that's my review! A game that fulfilled all the hopes of someone who was a huge fan of the original. Sometimes with this type of game it can't live up to your childhood nostalgia, but this one managed to. Great variety of Pokemon too, the Pokemon spinoffs have generally done a good job of using a mix of more and less popular Pokemon and giving the spotlight to some more obscure choices. Tbh, also a nice game if you're still in lockdown where you live...if you can't go places in real life, well, at least you can explore beautiful places in-game.
Summary: New Pokemon Snap is NOT a remake of the original Pokemon Snap, but an entirely new game based on the same concept of the player being a Pokemon photographer. At this point it's also received a free DLC download, which I've also played. Basically you're a young photographer who travels to the Lental Islands to help a professor and his assistants photograph all the Pokemon there for their research. I'd say that mechanically, it's maybe most similar to a rail shooter: your vehicle rides on a set track and you can freely move the camera around to photograph the Pokemon around you. You also earn various items as you go through the game that let you interact with the Pokemon. Compared to the original N64 game, which had only 6 courses and 62 Pokemon plus the secret course with Mew, this game has more than 200 Pokemon and 15 courses (with 3 more in the DLC). And many of those courses have night and day routes, which feature different Pokemon and behaviors on the same course. There's also more to photograph: the original game's Photodex only held one picture of each Pokemon, but in this game each Pokemon has four categories of behavior to get photos for. So there's a TON of content here. I've played about 55 hours so far, and I still haven't gotten every behavior and finished every quest.
Graphics: I love the graphics in this game, they combine the bright, cartoony aesthetic of Pokemon with detailed, sharp graphics. The environments are really detailed and complex, and I haven't noticed any issues with things lagging or not loading in fast enough or anything, it seems to play pretty smoothly. 5/5 for me.
Music: I forgot this category in the previous review...whoops. I would describe the music as...fine, basically? It all works nicely as background music for the courses and it's nice, but there's nothing outstanding or super memorable. But given the style of game, I don't think it NEEDS any outstanding tracks; just pleasant background music is really all that you need here. Aside from the music tracks, the audio direction of the game is quite strong; if you're wearing headphones (or using stereo speakers, I guess) you can hear where Pokemon are around you, which gives a lot of immersion and also makes it easier to find Pokemon that may not be immediately visible. All the little like, rustling leaves, splashing water, whistling wind type environmental noises are solid. So the environmental sound definitely makes the game more immersive AND is useful in gameplay. 4/5 to me.
Gameplay: The gameplay isn't TOO different from the original game: your screen's view is the view of your camera, you press a button to zoom in, you can throw items or activate features with buttons. I like that you can adjust a few things (in particular, you can make the zoom stay on until you press the button again, rather than having to hold down a button; you can also adjust how fast the camera moves in case you get that video game motion sickness). The controls all work fine and nothing feels janky.
BUT I do have a few gripes about some of the mechanics. You get two items you can throw: flufffruits (the equivalent of apples from the first game, I guess they wanted a fantasy name instead?) and Illumina orbs (spheres that make Pokemon light up basically, the plot focuses on researching the Illumina phenomenon). And I just don't like the throwing physics. This isn't a case of a mechanic being broken or whatnot--it works correctly and consistently. I just don't like the implementation that much. The flufffruit just don't throw as far as it feels like they should; the arc is very low, and getting them a decent distance requires angling the throw sharply upwards, which requires you to move the camera such that you can't see what you're throwing at. And sometimes to get specific interactions you need to throw them fairly far from you. I also am not in love with the mechanics of attracting Pokemon with the fluffruit; in the original game this felt slightly smoother (possibly because it was more simple due to being on a less powerful system). It is surprisingly difficult to actually lead Pokemon to a location with fluffruit, and it's hard to tell how close they have to fall to draw the Pokemon's attention. And although in theory throwing additional flufffruit should re-draw the Pokemon's attention, letting you lead it to a location, it feels fiddly; sometimes they just stop and eat the first one, and then they won't do anything else until the eating animation finishes, by which time you may be too far away to get the target interaction. It just feels more fussy than it should, considering that there's a number of quests that require you to lead a Pokemon to a specific spot, which is sometimes a fair distance away. So I just wanted that to be a little smoother.
The Illumina orbs also have some issues; they throw farther, which is nice, but unlike the fluffruit which just need to fall NEAR the Pokemon, the Illumina orb needs to actually make contact with the target. And in addition to Pokemon, you also need to throw them at Crystablooms, which are basically...magic flowers, I guess? And they're fairly small. It frequently feels needlessly difficult to hit the exact spot required to activate them, because the Illumina orbs are ALSO fairly small. Maybe I'm just bad at the throwing mechanics, but they just feel more difficult to use than they need to be. Like, the game itself feels mostly like a puzzle game (figuring out how to get specific Pokemon behaviors), not an action game, so why do I need to master this very precise action. For the Illumina Spot courses, you also frequently need to hit Pokemon with orbs while they're moving, and the physics of that are...frustrating. Particularly the ones where you need to get multiple hits in a row to activate the phenomenon.
In general, although I like that this game has way more Pokemon behaviors to capture, I'm somewhat dissatisfied by a few things. First, it's not totally clear what each category actually is. Some categories require a very specific behavior, but some seem to accept multiple behaviors and the difference between, say category 1 and 2 isn't totally clear to me. And getting specific behaviors sometimes requires very specific sequences of actions which are a bit obscure. I used a guide for some things, and some missions require you to hit a Pokemon with Illumina orbs multiple times, even though you don't get a reaction until the final one, so you have no indication that you should continue. Some missions also seem to only want, like, a specific frame of an animation, so it's not always clear why your photograph didn't fulfill the request. The DLC update also added indicators to the photo review screen showing which photos fulfill a mission, which is excellent and should have been in the base game, given how vague some of the missions are. But in general sometimes the different behaviors and missions just feel a little too obscure and fiddly. And even once you know what to do, for ones that involve throwing items, it can require multiple precise throws (all of which are timed because you can't stop your vehicle) and be frustratingly difficult to actually activate.
Maxing out the research level on each course also has some issues, although this has been mostly fixed by the DLC update. Each course has a research level, and as it increases, more Pokemon appear on the course and engage in different behaviors, so doing this for all courses is important. Pre-DLC, however, your score for each course was based ONLY on photos from that course that went in the Photodex, and since the same Pokemon can appear on multiple courses (and since the day and night versions have separate research levels but share many Pokemon), it was sometimes incredibly difficult to actually max all the levels. Because if you ALREADY got a like, 4500 point photo of a Pokemon on another course, you're not going to be able to just boost that by another 2k. But the DLC changed this to, as far as I can tell (the mechanic is not explicitly described anywhere in-game that I've seen), counting your highest-scoring photo of each Pokemon on that specific course. So even if your photo isn't your highest-scoring EVER, it can still count for that course. There's still 2 or 3 courses I'm struggling to max, but this change made it way easier and also feels more logical.
As mentioned in the summary, the sheer amount of content is a big strength for this game; the original could be completed in a few hours, this has orders of magnitude more content. And again, I haven't even 100% the game, and I ALREADY have 55 hours of gameplay. There's a lot of...not replay value I guess, but just continuing play value, because you can keep trying to get different shots and exploring different interactions. You also have all the online features, which I haven't even tried yet: you can post your photos online and see other people's photos. There's also a photo-editing mechanic, letting you add frames, stickers, filters, etc to your shots to save in your album or post online. So aside from the main focus of completing the photodex, there's also other stuff to play around with, giving you plenty to do.
Overall I'd say 4/5 for mechanics, I do have complaints but they're mostly small, specific things and some of them are my personal taste, not things necessarily wrong. Overall the gameplay is pretty intuitive and fun, there's just a few flaws.
Story: This game doesn't have THAT much of a story, and doesn't need it; it's a game focused on its mechanics basically. But it has more of a story than the original (the story of that game was, in its entirety, "you're a photographer hired to photograph all the Pokemon on this island"). You're researching the Illumina phenomenon and trying to discover the history of the area, and you do learn more with each island you visit. There's also more characters: aside from the professor, there are two child assistants, Rita and Phil, and Todd from the original game makes an appearance as well. They don't do much, but they're fun. The various missions you get are given by the different characters, so I guess that's a fun detail. But yeah this game doesn't need to have a story, and what it has is fun without being intrusive. 5/5.
Technical: I mentioned in this in the last review, but I rarely notice technical issues in games, so don't take this as like, an intensive analysis. But I didn't notice any technical issues. Everything seems to run smoothly, both in docked mode and handheld mode. And I'll add as a side note--I found the game equally playable in both modes. I was worried that in handheld mode the smaller screensize might be an issue, but it actually worked fine. 5/5.
Overall: I really loved Pokemon Snap as a kid and have long hoped that they'd make a new one, so I was inclined to like this game from the start lol. But I really enjoyed it, it captures the joy of the original game but greatly increases the detail and complexity and amount of content. It totally evokes the feeling of going on an adventure and exploring all these natural areas. The DLC is also awesome, aside from the handful of mechanical changes that fixed some issues, the new courses are also excellent. Each one has a day and night version and multiple paths inside the course, so they really are additional full courses. And one is clearly inspired by a course from the original game, which is such a fun reference for fans of the old N64 game. And it was free! This is the model of how DLC should work imo, it actually adds to the game. I would've been willing to pay for it as well, given the amount of content it provides. I'm hoping that maybe they'll be additional DLC going forward...? I'd definitely play it. The one issue with this game is that some of the behaviors and missions are too obscure, and I personally found it sometimes too difficult to hit the intended target with throwable items, but those are pretty small flaws, and heck, nowadays you can just use a guide if you can't solve a specific mission. Would definitely recommend. It's a really relaxing game. 4/5 overall, excellent with a couple flaws.
So that's my review! A game that fulfilled all the hopes of someone who was a huge fan of the original. Sometimes with this type of game it can't live up to your childhood nostalgia, but this one managed to. Great variety of Pokemon too, the Pokemon spinoffs have generally done a good job of using a mix of more and less popular Pokemon and giving the spotlight to some more obscure choices. Tbh, also a nice game if you're still in lockdown where you live...if you can't go places in real life, well, at least you can explore beautiful places in-game.
