Pokémon TCG Pocket It’s coming to iPhone and Android this week, and after years of poor alternatives, it’s a surprisingly refreshing and streamlined version of the card game. Pokémon Pretty much a license to print money, but TCG Pocket Does a great job of highlighting what people love about the game – the cards themselves – and to the exclusion of most everything else. Still, as a big fan of Marvel Snap, I hope the mobile game borrows a few things from the 2022 Second Supper comic.
Most of my idle smartphone time in the past two days has been spent playing games Pokémon TCG Pocket Instead of doom scrolling twitter or Taking AI-slop on Instagramthis is exactly what I want from an excellent daily grind mobile game. All the currencies and sub-economies designed to let you spend money on the free-to-play game are a bit complicated and difficult to parse, but combat is fun and opening virtual booster packs by swiping your finger to cut the pack is surprisingly effectively simulated The sheer joy of doing this in real life.
I’m not that obsessed yet Pokémon TCG Pocket However, like me at Marvel Snap, I think there are three reasons for this. The first is race length. Marvel Snap’s combat passes with ease, making it feel like starting another fight is relatively low-risk no matter what’s going on around you. TCG Pocket It’s a bit much involved. Players have a cumulative timer of 20 minutes, with each round counting down from 60 seconds upwards. Time is rarely squeezed, but games can still feel a bit long as players stack up their benches and power up their Pokémon. More than once I’ve finished a game and thought, “That’s great, but do I really have time to play another game?”
The second thing is to hold Pokémon TCG Pocket Give me a little refund as a competition reward. Except for bite-sized matches, Marvel Snapshot There’s a neat progression that revolves around acquiring additional cards to upgrade them and earn points, which can be used to acquire new cards. It’s a clever twist on the traditional RNG booster formula. TCG PocketAs an adaptation of an existing card game, it doesn’t have that luxury. Unfortunately, as it stands, the only reward for winning a match is a paltry amount of experience points that contribute to overall leveling. Raising it brings additional bonuses, but none feel very obvious. The result is that ending a game feels a bit anticlimactic, rather than releasing a dopamine that immediately makes you want to play another game.
Finally, there’s the card itself. In addition to building your collection, the second goal of Marvel Snap is to obtain (sometimes through outright purchase) cool alternative card art for your favorite decks. It provides something else to work towards, as well as a way to express your unique spin on popular deck types. again, TCG Pocket It runs into trouble here, as it works off of existing card art, and while some cards have multiple versions to unlock, there aren’t many, and there’s no real way to directly chase them . It would be awesome if you opened the package and got the full art variant! If not, then, wait for the next random pull.
It’s still early and TCG Pocket Otherwise well done, certainly better than every other digital version Pokémon A card game I used to play. There’s currently only one set of cards to collect, and there isn’t much to covet in the paid in-game store. I’m sure this will all change soon, but for now the game doesn’t quite capture the full magic of my early years Marvel Snapshot. Maybe this is for the best. I eventually had to delete the game from my phone because it consumed so much of my free time.
