A simple and frantic paced puzzle game let down by brevity and punishing boss battles
User Rating: 5 | Pokemon Torouze DS
Pokémon Link is a puzzle game where Pokémon fill up the screen and you must use the stylus to slide rows and columns up/down and left/right. If you slide horizontally, the icons will wrap around, Sliding up just nudges the Pokémon up temporarily which is useful to complete a group. When sliding down, Pokémon on the bottom wrap round and fall back down from the top. Your job is to initially match a row or column of 4 of the same Pokémon, when this happens, they disappear and the 'Link Chance' is activated. This gives you around a second to find a group of 3 Pokémon and if successful, you can then match groups of 2 making it possible to create huge chain reactions, which will net you big points. However due to the frantic pace, this can often be up to luck rather than strategic planning. Due to the speed that the Pokémon enter the screen, you have to constantly play at a frantic pace, especially in the boss battles. If you hesitate more than a second, the boss will either throw a block in there which is hard to get rid of, or cause all Pokémon to display as silhouettes until either a few seconds pass or you create a link of 4. This is hard to do when all you have is silhouettes. On the final boss, you will play for a couple of mins only to fail because you hesitated a moment which is insanely frustrating and cheap. Although the game feels short (nearly completed in 1 day), you do have the incentive of replaying the levels to beat the target point score, and in typical Pokémon fashion; to collect every single Pokémon. This is because each stage in the story has a different set of Pokémon, and some of these are rare and may even disappear if you don't clear them within a few seconds. Personally I quite liked the game but found the game too short and the boss battles frustrating.
