Pokemon Shuffle is a recently-released Candy Crush Saga-esque game for the Nintendo 3DS and 2DS. And, although the free game is a nice offering from Nintendo, there are some fundamental flaws with the game itself.
Pokemon Shuffle is a cute game, I'll give it that much. The sprites for all the Pokemon are cool looking and especially in the Mega Pokemon stages, the sprites for those Pokemon look REALLY GOOD. However, it's the whole lives and coins system that really irritates me.
In Pokemon Shuffle, you have 5 "hearts" that replenish themselves every 30 minutes. These hearts are needed to start playing any level. This I am fine with, as it is the same in Candy Crush Saga. However, what really made me upset about the game is that no matter the outcome of a level, you will lose one heart. So, no matter how well you are doing, you will have to come grinding to a halt and wait for the rest of the time to lapse so you can continue playing. Just for another Candy Crush comparison, in the Candy Crush Saga app, the player only loses a heart if they fail to beat the level. Therefore, hot streaks can occur and do occur quite frequently, so you can keep a good thing going. However, in Pokemon Shuffle, the mandatory losing of hearts is a huge misstep taken by the game.
Additionally, the coin system seems very off. Every day, the player can earn 500 coins by simply "checking in", or connecting to the Internet and seeing if there are any game announcements or new Pokemon obtainable. However, buying a Great Ball will set you back 2,500 coins, or five days worth of checking in. And the Great Ball is my other major complaint about the game, What the Great Ball does is double the percent chance that you will catch a Pokemon. This however is extremely useless when the odds of catching that Pokemon are 1%, because 2% isn't much better. And, the main point of this is that if you were to spend money on the game (which, please don't) and then buy the Great Ball with your real life USD currency, the Great Ball will still fail on you. You just spent real money. On an in-game Great Ball. And it failed. I'll bet you look pretty dumb right now.
Overall, the game is charming and cute and I really enjoyed it and I still enjoy it. I love the timed "expert" stages and I love love love the graphics. And, if you don't mind setting the system down for 2 and a half hours every time you run out of lives, than this game is really good. However, for those of you who want a game that will provide your means of entertainment for, say, a long car ride. This is not the game at all.
Pokemon Shuffle
7.0 - average
Pokemon Shuffle has the charm of any Pokemon game, but the quick depletion of hearts and the relative uselessness of the power-ups leads the game to be mostly frustrating and unenjoyable.
