It’s Pokemon. But not! There’s a few of these Pokemon-likes coming out recently like this, Coromon, Nexomon and probably a bunch of others I’m forgetting. This one seemed to be a bit more competitive-focused, with some small but interesting changes to the formula. It’s also been in early access for a while but I decided to wait until full release before getting it.

I actually took a lot of notes while playing this one. So I may address notes in this review more than usual since this is a game that can be described very quickly. Also I’ll just call Temtem, the creatures themselves, Pokemon. Because they’re Pokemon.

Well let’s talk about this!

Developer: Crema Games
Publisher: Humble Games
Release date: September 6, 2022
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4, Xbone, PS5, Xbox X/S (PC version reviewed)
Genre: Pokemon

Review

Well there’s a story. Kinda. You play as a child that is coming of age or something, and becoming a Temtem trainer because of reasons. Actually, weirdly enough, the story starts out placing great importance on going into a school, but legitimately I think the school can entirely be skipped (there’s a sidequest or two in there, and tutorial text to read). Soon enough you start encountering Clan Belsoto, the bad guys who want to… huh… do bad things? TBH I kinda missed the entire motivation of the villains. Teaming up with a detective and the gym leaders as you go on your quest to become a tamer, you fight the Belsoto, and eventually there’s a final fight against the secret leader of the Belsoto which was a plot twist that you probably saw coming from the first few minutes of meeting the villains. Really there’s hardly a story and all the characters are boring. There’s characters I hardly remember even interacting getting married at the end, no idea where that came from. The one time something actually interesting happens story-wise (a bit after the halfway point), it’s take that from you with no explanation at all later. There’s no stakes, your character (and several others) survives impossible things a couple times too. Stuff keeps happening for completely no reason at all. There’s not really anything going on in this game story-wise. It really does think it does though. Also the ending is really lame.

At least performance-wise I can be extremely positive with the PC version. I found the game looked largely the same on ultra settings and not-ultra settings (I legit could not tell the different), so by dropping that I was guaranteeing a framerate of over 200 in even the worst-performing areas of the game (this chugged to ~150 on Ultra), and up to 600fps in some battles. Completely useful in a turn-based game.

The graphics are pretty average though. The characters all look fucking horrendous, with only, like, 2 faces in the game that look acceptable. They have weirdly blurry textures too for their faces. The environments look okay, they’re not super detailed or anything but they do the job. The Pokemon look okay. They’re obviously very similar to real Pokemon, and a lot of the designs are pretty unimaginative, but there’s some nice ones here that I like, such as Golzy.

And now we go onto gameplay…

This is Pokemon, just straight up. You walk around the world (though this world is completely linear, while most Pokemon games have some design to the world). In tall grass, you get attacked by Pokemon, which you fight with your own, and you can catch wild pokemon to add to your team. Some of the towns have gyms, which you can go in to fight the gym leader. The Pokemon evolve at certain levels, learn moves as they level. The Pokemon are different types, can be dual-type, and each type has some other types that they’re either strong or weak against (so some type combos are quadruple weak to some types). Much like Pokemon there is same-type attack bonus (STAB). You build teams of 6 Pokemon. I really don’t have to say much more about this for you to know what this game is like. It’s Pokemon.

What makes this a bit different from Pokemon is the combat. All battles are double battles (sometimes the opponent has only 1 Pokemon on their team but, generally, there’s 2 opponents), so there’s plenty of strategy with the otherwise simple task of determining your 2 lead party members. The other very big difference is that every attack has 100% accuracy, and any special effect like poison or sleep or the other weird-ass status effects happen 100% of the time as well. No crits, no luck, just strategy. Most of combat does just work like Pokemon, with each Pokemon getting to choose one of 4 moves, or switching (switching happens before anything else on a turn except for the Cage move… very useful), or using an item. You can actually use one item per pokemon, or switch both out, or just attack both. Attacks can target anyone on the field including your own Pokemon as well, some have different AOE properties and such. OH and the moves have a priority system, almost forgot to mention that. Very Low, Low, Normal, High, Very High and Ultra. Ultra happens first (before Swaps even, and ties are broken by speed), Very High uses 1.75x the speed of the user, High uses 1.5x the speed of the user, Normal will use the base speed, Low will use half the speed, and Very Low will go last (and ties are broken by speed). OH OH, and stat boosts are kept even after switching. Useful!

Another fun change is actually the moves. Instead of having the 4 slots and that’s it, every move a Pokemon learns here is kept on the side, so any move they’ve learned from leveling or the TM-equivalent here, you can, outside of battle, just switch in and out as you want. So you never lose a move. Very nice.

Also, there’s no PP in battle, you can actually use moves infinitely. However, Pokemon in this game have a stat called Stamina and each move has a Stamina cost. You can use moves that will drop you below 0 Stamina, in which case some of your HP is used (more HP if you’re higher level, there’s a calculation for the actual amount), and it prevents you from using a move next turn to recover a bit of Stamina (you can still switch Pokemon and use items). If you do use HP, the game tells you how much you’ll use, and you have to keep in mind this can kill you. Stamina recovery I do find to be a bit too low (it’s only a few every turn), but you can recover Stamina if you’re switched out, so that helps manage things a bit. Also some moves have cooldown, so you might not be able to use them on your first turn in battle. The Stamina and and cooldown systems are actually pretty cool, since you can’t just spam your most bullshit moves but you pretty much always have access to them since you can’t, say, run out of PP halfway through a cave.

And the breeding/stat control is a bit in-depth, but not required for finishing the main game. Much like Pokemon having IVs and EVs, the Pokemon here have SVs and TVs. Different being that they’re just directly displayed here. SVs are like IVs and can’t be very easily affected on a single Pokemon (they’re randomly generated when you find the wild Pokemon). The effect SVs have are a bit nebulous as there’s a calculation to it and each stat is affected differently, but SVs can be anywhere between 1 and 50. A Pokemon can technically have 50 on all stats, but that will likely take you a bunch of time in breeding (an egg-hateched Pokemon has a chance or not of getting the best SVs between the parents, or the lowest, or in-between). There’s a few items you can use to influence SV transfer chance and such, but basically it’s luck (which is weird for this game).  OH, and I believe Shinies (here called “Luma”) have something like 3 guaranteed perfect SVs, so shiny hunting is a team building strat. TVs are like EVs, they’re gained from battle (different Pokemon give different TVs). A Pokemon can have up to 1000 TVs total, and 500 TVs maximum per stat. So you can max 2 stats, or just max one and spread the other points around as you want. There’s items that affect TVs, may it be increasing it or decreasing it, as well as held items that prevent the gain of specific TVs, so you can kinda fine-tune this value. Fun! Much like SVs, TVs are part of the stat calculation in a different way per stat.

The other change is how evolution works. In Pokemon, your Pokemon evolves at certain levels, or with items, or with certain weird conditions. In Temtem, most of the evolutions happen through leveling, but it’s not specific levels. Rather, it’s the amount of levels since you caught the Pokemon. So, for example, Halzhi evolves into Molgu after 16 level ups. If you got the Halzhi at level 1, it evolves at level 17. If you got it at level 50, it evolves at level 66. There’s a few exceptions, such as one that evolves with a trade, one that evolves 6 different ways (there’s 6 places you can bring it to), one that evolves when you max the TVs on it, and there’s a few that evolve different either based on sex or abilities. But most are by levels. It’s a bit of a weird system, I’m not really sure why they went with this. It’s fine but it’s weird. It does make the Pokemon evolve faster if you get them out of eggs, but why?

Now to address my notes! These are mostly complaints or pointing out questionable… things.

The linearity of the game causes issues, IMO. Which is something weird to say since I don’t usually have problems with linear games. Namely, not all areas in the game have all the different kinds of stores. Say you found a Pokemon you like while you’re in the Tucma section of the game and want to breed it to get an egg version so you can evolve it faster… fuck you. The breeding center is in Omninesia and you’re stuck in Tucma for a while. There’s no fast travel for a majority of the game, and no way to move faster until the post-game (there’s one Pokemon you can ride, that’s a post-game side-quest) and a scooter (which there’s no way you can feasibly beat the sidequest for). So even if a past area is available to get back to on foot (which I think only 2 of the 6 islands are directly linked), it’s a hassle to get to it if you’re far enough in your current region. Same with Trade Houses.

There’s some things that Pokemon got right in its very first game that somehow Temtem didn’t. There’s an easy one: turning off attack animations. Battles can be weirdly slow already, having to see all the attack animations over and over feels like a bit much. Fast travel is something Pokemon did right, right away. It starts off mostly linear, but you get a vehicle to move faster early enough (which I already mentioned you don’t in Temtem until post-game), and then you get the fly HM which you can use to go to any city you’ve previously been. The fast travel here requires a meh sidequest (actually almost all the sidequests suck but I’m not gonna spend too much time on that), and then, instead of just being able to go to any town you’ve already been to, instead you have to go back through the game and find teleport points manually… and then you have to PAY to teleport (unless you teleport to the port of the island).

Battles have elements that are very slow. I already mentioned the attack animations which you should be able to turn off. But another thing is the Abilities and Held Items. Whenever one of those activate, you get a pop-up that tells you something activated. That pop-up takes a few seconds to get out of the screen and nothing happens while it’s still there. And, to make matters worse, the pop-up doesn’t tell you what that ability or held item did, so unless you just know every ability on every Pokemon and what every held item does. So you’re wasting my time telling me things activated without having the decency to tell me what that did… Okay? Also, the swap animation takes a sizeable amount of time.

Stone Trench is a fucking bullshit move. Moves that give evasion in general are a bit bullshit (especially on fast Pokemon), but Stone Trench gives evasion for 2 turns, sometimes 3 for some reason, making it WAY stronger than moves that just give 1. It’s a move exclusive to one Pokemon, but it’s still a bullshit-ass move that ruined a few of my attempts at the final boss (there’s workarounds, like using mass-attacks to at least deal damage to one pokemon while getting rid of the evasion… but it can be a bit rough). I’m sure there’s other moves that are broken, but this one actually pissed me off. Also it may have been slightly my fault since I DID somehow have a team where 3 of my Pokemon were weak to earth attacks (I did have varied types but no dual-typings that were good against earth).

One thing that I never understood is… why is this an MMO? There’s nothing MMO-ish about the gameplay at all. You see everyone else running around the world and stuff, but why? There’s some multiplayer elements like trading, competitive battles, the auction house, co-op, and lairs… but why do I need to see other people playing the game? There could just be a spot in the Pokemon Centers to do the multiplayer stuff. I actually don’t get it. The trading aspect is a bit weird since you do have access to all the Pokemon, but I kinda get it as far as competitive team building, you can trade around for perfect SVs and TVs on Pokemon and such, so it’s not terrible.

Final boss is both bullshit and kinda meh. One thing I do like is that a few of the final bosses/sidequests are using fairly competitive teams so you need good strats to beat them, but the final boss is really dumb. He has a strong team, which is fine, but the “strong” trainers in the game really annoyingly keep switching Pokemon if you have their weakness on your side, which makes a straightforward battle kinda bullshit. This is why there’s moves like Cage (which you absolutely NEED to beat this guy), but the other problem comes with the fact that you lose if the combat lasts 15 turns… Even if you beat his last Pokemon, if you do so on the 15th turn, you die anyways. This was a REALLY rough battle, partly because of the Pokemon that has Stone Trench.

Random notes I took:
“no I’m not building element-specific teams for sidequests fuck you”
“sometimes after a battle you glitch into the NPC you were fighting and get stuck”
“pokemon really enjoy killing themselves” (in reference to the Stamina system dealing damage if you use more Stamina than you have)
“map system is ass”
“can’t add caught pokemon into squad” (actually could’ve made a bigger point on this… in Pokemon you can get rid of one of your Pokemon when you catch one to add the new one to the team, in this you have to go back to the Pokemon Center to switch your team around)
“let me do the fucking sticker sidequest the fuck is wrong with you” (OH… for some reason the game just lets you do whatever sidequests when you want (moreso when you finally get fast travel) but for some reason the NPC that gives you progress for the sticker sidequest just outright refuses to tell you until you get to the post-game… I don’t know why)

Not in my notes but:
I find the game too grindy for building a competitive team. There’s actually a method to get enough EXP to max level in 2-3 battles, but it DOES require 5 very specific maxed-out Pokemon, so it’s a bit dumb. There’s a lot in this game that I think is cool about the team building, this is not one of them.

I’m pretty curious if it can manage to get a sizeable competitive scene when the competition is, you know, Pokemon. It does have a built-in bans and picks system which is cool (both players select 8 Pokemon and they take turns picking and banning like in LoL to build a 5-mon team). One thing I do like is that all fully-evolved Pokemon actually seem fairly competitive as far as I’ve seen, so a lot of team-building is based on ability synergy and move selection and such… alongside SV and TV training. Not sure I’d ever really watch it, but it could be cool.

Also, some features are not yet live in the current version that I think were meant to be, like a built-in Nuzlocke mode. That’s coming later, I wouldn’t dare try that considering how bad I was at this.

And there’s some post-game. In the full release there’s a new island to do stuff on, and there’s just continuing to do the side-quests and team-building stuff.

Overall

It certainly is a Pokemon game that plays just like Pokemon.

It does some interesting things with the concept, while, at the same time, being very much the same thing. I find some of the design choices to be a bit random. Like the fact that it’s an MMO for kinda no reason at all. And the map system sucking, and the fast travel system being dumb, and the final boss being BS.

But I like some of the changes such as everything being double battles, and I think the determinism of the combat makes it a different enough experience from Pokemon for this to not just be a clone. It has some just nice things like SVs and TVs being displayed, and overall… It’s pretty fun.

I’d give this a pretty mild recommendation. I’d rather play the regular Pokemon games, but this is a decent alternative (or something to play if you’re hankering for some Pokemon in-between major Pokemon releases).