Pokémon Rumble Rush Review: A Lazy And Dull Unfinished Game

Pokémon Rumble Rush is so incredibly ugly, lazy, and boring that we are honestly perplexed that The Pokémon Company actually thought it was OK to publish such a mess. We know that the game spent quite a while in development hell, but it really should have just stayed there, as it brings absolutely nothing of quality.

The base idea is that you have to explore a series of islands to look for Pokémon. For some reason that’s beyond our understanding, that requires you to drop a feather onto some trees to uncover a Pokémon. Then, you will send your own Pokémon to this area to battle an army of generic, identical Pokémon in the hope of catching one.

Each Pokémon has a CP stat, which reflects its combat power. This is a number that you will want to pay attention to, because if you want to progress, you have to face a series of bosses, and you can only do so if the CP rating of your Pokémon is high enough.

Now, the only way for you to obtain feathers is to defeat a boss, so that means you shall have to backtrack and farm previous levels to get a Pokémon powerful enough to overcome the boss. Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing on its own – many great games do have grindy mechanics. The problem here is, the combat system of Pokémon Rumble Rush is just so painfully repetitive and dull.

Pokémon Rumble Rush is just so incredibly ugly, lazy, and boring

All you have to do is tapping on the screen to attack, and more often than not you’ll one-shot any enemy caught in the blow, so there is basically no challenge here. At the end of each stage is a mini-boss that might require four or five hits to take down, but these bosses deal virtually no damage in return, so again, you are never in any kind of danger whatsoever.

On top of that, you can have your Pokémon dodge out of harm’s way (loosely speaking, as there isn’t really any harm to get out of here) by swiping on the screen, which is a piece of cake since enemy attacks are all extremely telegraphed. If you do fail a stage, it’ll be because you’re too bored to even try, or you’re busy doing something else.

The shop and tournament are not available at the moment

As you fight through the levels, you will also have several incredibly easy challenges to complete, which grant you gems as a reward. We are pretty sure that this is Pokémon Rumble Rush’s premium currency, but we can’t spend it at the moment as the in-game shop has been permanently closed.

Aside from the comically bad single player campaign, there’s also a tournament mode, which is presumably PvP. We say “presumably” because it is actually not available either. Seriously, you have to wonder why they bothered to launch the game in the first place when it’s clearly not complete.

Don't play this game, just don't

Pokémon Rumble Rush is not only repetitive, dull, and mind-numbingly easy, but it’s very clear that it is not even a finished product. You can tell just by its look: the 3D graphics are frankly terrible. Seriously, games released 20 years ago still looked better than this. The background is just a blurry mess, the Pokémon models are clumsily designed, and the animations are sloppy.  Everything about this game just screams “placeholder”. It seems like this is just an attempt from The Pokémon Company to recoup development costs. But with something like this hot pile of garbage? Good luck!

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