If you’re looking for a fun filled game that allows you to raise and abuse monsters to fight for you, then you might need to look elsewhere. Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals may have the monster training and fighting down, but in the fun department, it could use a boost. Beyond the Portals is by no means awful, but it is definitely not great either.
Anyone who didn’t play the first Spectrobes game will have no real trouble understanding the story line. You won’t know who some of the characters are when you first start off or what some of the events they talk about are, but they clear it up real fast which is nice. The story is no masterpiece and is unoriginal. Without giving away any specifics, the story is as follows; Everything’s fine after the last game, but the bad guys, the Krawl are back. A Member of the Nanairo Planetary patrol has gone missing and Rallen, the main character, has to find him and destroy the Krawl. You Fly from planet to planet and rid each one of a boss. Portals start popping up and leading to other planets which end up having even more Krawl and they’re all being sent to your planets. Nothing special but it does try to keep it somewhat interesting, but much like the gameplay it’s linear and falls short.
While the game has enough elements to keep it interesting for a short period of time
the gameplay becomes stale fast. Battles become tedious; digging is a chore and little to
no side quests makes the game even less interesting than it should be. Battles consist of you controlling two monsters known as Spectrobes of an element type, either Corona [red],
Flash [blue], or Aurora [green]. There’s an order in which each one is stronger than the next
which allows for a certain degree of strategy as you run into vortexes holding the Krawl. Sadly, most battles lack any real depth. You have two monsters and you control one
at a time. The other acts independently on its own unless you hit the button to switch monsters. Battles are nothing more than running around dodging attacks waiting for the opportune time to get in your hit or just running up to the enemy and mashing A, unless your ally falls. When your special attack meter is full you can run over to their orb and press Y to revive them slightly. If they’re not dead though, the Y button will unleash a combo attack hitting all enemies on screen. The game tries to get you to do different combinations of monsters to make it more fun and help boost the amount of time you spend awakening fossils and training them, but after a fair bit of messing around, I found it quite unnecessary to switch out the team I started training from the beginning. Not to mention when you awaken fossils most of them will be low level and you’ll have Spectrobes well into the higher levels (the max level you can achieve for a single Spectrobe is 99). The lower levels are not
very useful later on in the game when you’ll need your constant high levels.
The other form of battling comes from when you’re running around as Rallen.
He’s equipped with a sword, blaster and a fist. Swarming around vortexes are Krawl Dust. Rallen can attack the Krawl Dust using one of these three attack methods. The fist usually stuns, sword swipes and blaster reaches from afar. It’s clunky and not worth it. You’ll gain EXP and when there’s enough he’ll gain a star ranking, but it’s completely useless. You may buy better equipment for Rallen also, but it’s just a money sink.
One of the biggest aspects of the game is digging up minerals along with fossils. It’s a neat idea, just so unnecessary after you have your standard team. When you find an area to dig you get entered into a mini-game of sorts. You have to dig out the mineral or fossil by tapping on the touchscreen around and on top of the item. If it takes too much damage you’ll break it. When it’s successfully extracted you’ll get graded. To keep it somewhat interesting you’ll have different environments which require different extraction procedures. Ice needs to be melted first, sand needs to be blown away and water needs to be defogged.
Fossils need to be awaken so you can have your child form Spectrobes. When you pick the fossil to awaken you’ll be shown a screen with a black box on it. You will have to speak into the microphone and keep the meter in the black box for 3 seconds. If you go over or under you’ll have to start over. Once when I was doing this I was screening a telemarketer call and used their automated message they were leaving to awaken one so, you just need any constant sound source. Once awakened you have to raise your Spectrobes and evolve it into an adult before it can battle. There are a lot of Spectrobes to be found, so if you’re a perfectionist then you could find yourself busy for quite a while.
The minerals you dig up are needed for two reasons. Firstly, each Spectrobes needs to have eaten a certain number of minerals, as well as battle a certain amount of time. It also needs to be a certain level before evolving to the next stage. Secondly, they level faster by eatting minerals to gain EXP and thus raise levels moreso than battling. In the beginning this isn’t a problem, but as time went on and I grew tired of battling, I found this to be a lifesaver. That is until I ran out of minerals. This forced me to go digging and in turn made digging more of a chore than a breather from the game and ultimately brought the fun factor down.
An interesting aspect of the game is not directly found in the game but in the packaging of the game itself. Inside you’ll find a package of card. When you’re far enough into the game the lower deck of your ship will have a bunch of machine along with the standard care units. One of the machines is for these cards. Each card has a series of holes on it. When you activate the machine you have to put the card on the touch screen and then follow the holes by the number next to them. What this does is unlocks in-game material. Two of the cards I had were for minerals while the other two were for Child Spectrobes.
The game does have an online mode. You’re allowed to do two things online. Battle and buy/sell/download Spectrobes. I tried to find a battle with a random opponent and it took a bit of time for a random one to show up. When one finally did, they canceled before the battle could start. After that I had no luck finding a battle from then on. I asked some people for their friend codes to try out battling, but I got no replies so I cannot comment on the battle aspects. The exchanging of Spectrobes though is a nice feature. You can put your Spectrobes up for sale. Set the price, then wait for someone to buy it. You can also search and buy other player’s Spectrobes if you have the money. Every Friday you’ll receive 10 download points. You can take these points and download different Spectrobes from the creators which are their favorites. The ones I downloaded were all level 40, so not a bad grouping. Of course,
this made me switch out a few I was training and replace them as my own Spectrobes at the time were only about level 23. This made training on your own to be pointless even more then it already was. Other aspects of the online mode are leaderboards for most EXP, most digging EXP and other such generic stats. Another nice incentive for perfectionists.
From a technical standpoint, Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals excels slightly. The graphics are rendered in full 3D and each Spectrobe looks great. Rooms on the planets are quite big and spacious, but empty and traveling through them is a hassle. You find yourself just wanting to get to the other side as fast as possible. It does have some nice shiny video clips every now and then however. Music on the other hand gets repetitive and is unmemorable. Sound effects gets heard over and over and is more annoying if anything. I found myself turning the sound off and listening to a CD while I played.
While Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals is a decent enough game that tries to push the DS’ hardware and have some intuitive gameplay, it just falls short of being a must have for DS owners. If you’ve been looking for a game in the genre, you may find something to enjoy however.
