E3 2008: Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals Impressions

At E3 2008, we got a first glimpse of the next entry in Disney's fledgling role-playing game series, Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals. If you aren't familiar with Spectrobes, it has a few things in common with Pokemon: It's an RPG, and you collect monsters, train them, and then send them into battle. However, the similarities end there. Instead of playing a precocious earthbound youth, you'll play as Rallen and Gina, intergalactic police and planetary explorers. In Beyond the Portals, you've landed on a planet in search of an artifact.

Things seem to be going well until you realize the planet is full of monsters. Fortunately, you can capture spectrobes and make them fight for you. To catch a spectrobe, you watch for signs as to where one might be buried, then you simply dig it up. After a little nurturing it will transform into a powerful, elemental battle beast ready to defend you from even the fiercest foes. Battles are represented by scary black tornadoes spinning through the environment, so you don't have to fight if you don't want to.

If you do find yourself in a scrape, two of your spectrobes will enter the fight on your behalf. You will control one of them at the start, but you can switch between controlling the two any time at the push of a button. Combat is in real time, so you better jump into the thick of things and start swinging away as soon as a fight begins.

Though you'll certainly do your share of fighting, or rather, your minions will, you'll also use them to solve puzzles. In one example, our demonstrator had a spectrobe join him on the alien landscape, because he had a feeling there might be more to the scene than meets the eye. So he had his spectrobe search, and what do you know? It found buried treasure. Of course, he didn't want to trust treasure to the indiscriminate claws of his pink pet armadillo, so he got his excavating tools out and set to work.

This led to a digging minigame. Like scratching off a lottery ticket, we used the stylus to clear away the dirt. Once we had exposed part of the artifact, though, we had to be careful not to scrape it, lest it be damaged. So we cleared it off, blew into the microphone to clear away the dust and chips, and then extracted our prize. It was a fancy green rock. Now, our heroes couldn't do anything with it, but it just so happens that green rocks, when eaten by green monsters, make the latter much stronger and more experienced.

That makes sense, especially in an RPG context of leveling up and gaining new combat powers. Though we've dug up only a fraction of the content that will be available when Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals ships in September 2008, we have a feeling we'll dig the rest, too.