Pokémon Battle Revolution (Wii) Review

Sadly, it's not at all the game that we wanted it to be. While of course the wonderful battling is there in all its glory, there's very little else included - and by 'very little' we mean 'absolutely nothing'. What you've got here is the series' accomplished battle system in tact, just spruced up with big screen sound and visuals, but other than these presentational improvements there's not really anything that will want anybody want to upgrade from the DS version. Think of it as a Christmas dinner where you have a beautifully cooked turkey (battle system) that's extremely tasty, but all of the trimmings and other ingredients that make the dinner so great are just...absent without any explanation.

What's insulting is that it's not only a step back from the Gamecube's Colosseum games, it's also managed to roll back from the original Stadium titles from the N64. The lack of an RPG mode we would just about begrudgingly accept with a myriad of grumbles, but the fact that they couldn't even be bothered to throw in a collection of mini-games goes to show how little care has been paid to this outside of the visuals.

What do we have, then? We have a series of tournaments for you to battle your way through, that's what. If you don't have Diamond/Pearl on DS, you get rental 'Mon, and not even ones that you pick properly - you're given pre-set trainer cards with creatures selected for you on them. If you do have Diamond/Pearl, you can upload your own beasts onto the system and use those. We meet a conundrum here, though: if you've not got the DS version, Battle Revolution's hardly worth playing because of the restrictions given on what you can actually use. If you have got the DS version, you've got everything that this is offering and more already, aside the presentation side of it, so there's no point playing it at all. Even the online play is present in the DS version, and while we didn't experience any issues online issues with Battle Revolution while playing with either friends or random strangers, we didn't in Diamond/Pearl either - and we could use voice chat in that, too, whereas that's not possible in Battle Revolution as Wii voice chat hasn't been implemented yet.

It's a strange game graphically. Some parts, such as the environments and the human characters, are actually probably the best things seen on Wii. They have a great style and are really smooth. The monsters themselves though are a mixed bag; some look like they were made up in a few minutes, others look fantastic. There's no doubting the battle effects, however, as they're lovely. The battlers still don't hit each other properly with physical attacks despite claims to the contrary - sometimes, but not nearly all the time.