EvoMon

Genre: Arcade / Virtual Pet

Players: 1

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Review:

EvoMon, released in 2022 on PC and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2024, is a game that combines multiple Arcade-style minigames with a Virtual Pet-style Simulation, all within the trappings of a game that clearly wants people to be thinking of the Pokemon franchise.

In that respect, this game absolutely nails what it’s aiming for. This game’s pixel art presentation is colorful, nicely-detailed, and features some great character designs, many of which seem like they could have been used in a Pokemon game. This is joined by a lighthearted synthesized soundtrack that works well enough for the game, but doesn’t make quite as much of an impression as the visuals.

For the gameplay, this game starts with the basic structure of a Pokemon game, but it doesn’t really play like a Pokemon game in any way. You get your choice of one of three eggs to hatch into your own personal little monsters. You’ll raise this monster, feeding it, cleaning up after it, training with it, and eventually after evolving it twice into more powerful forms you’ll take it into an arena to fight other monsters, or go out adventuring to discover treasure.

If that sounds not too far off from Pokemon, hold up, because none of the above really happens in the way you might think. First, the Virtual Pet elements of the game are very light – there are bars for health, food, and experience, and you just need to use a healing potion when health is low, feed it food when the food meter is low, and press a button evolve it once it gets enough experience.

The training is done via a variety of minigames, ranging from a Doodle Jump clone to an Arcade Stacker Game clone to a Flappy Bird clone. These minigames are all decent enough, but all extremely simple to the point where they won’t hold your interest long. These training minigames (plus a fishing minigame) are how you get food and coins to buy pet supplies too. Oh, and the battles with other monsters? Also minigames. The adventuring? A brief maze where you’re automatically kicked out after a limited number of moves.

If you let your animal’s stats get low enough that they’re about to die, they get cryogenically frozen and you’ll have to either “resurrect” them back to their original un-evolved form, start anew with a new egg, or combine two of your frozen monsters into another monster… which doesn’t look like either of its two donors.

So maybe you can start to see the issue here. While nothing here is outright terrible, just about everything seems half-baked. The minigames are too shallow, the Virtual Pet elements are too minimal, there’s no collecting element and no continuity from one monster to the next… oh, and apart from their main stats, there doesn’t seem like any significant difference between the monsters.

As a result, EvoMon is a game with a great look and some interesting ideas, but none of those ideas has been developed into anything that makes this game especially worthwhile to play. There’s plenty of different parts to this package, but they’re all shallow and poorly thought-out, leading to an ultimately unsatisfying experience.

tl;dr – EvoMon is a game with Arcade minigames and Virtua Pet elements housed within a package that imitates Pokemon, but everything here is shallow and gives players little reason to keep playing after trying everything out. Skip it.

Grade: C

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