My first thought when I started playing Spectrobes: “They plan to make everything from movies to underwear based on this game.” It looks like this is an attempt to create the next monster-collecting craze. Whether the game is strong enough to support all this remains to be seen.

Graphically, Spectrobes has a bit of good with its bad. The various menus are slick and futuristic. Everything rotates, glows, or flashes appropriately to give that “hi-tech” feel. It’s the rest of the game that exhibits a lack of excitement. Backgrounds and battles are rendered in jagged, polygonal 3D. I just get a bit tired of saying, “Wow, this is pretty good for a handheld!” Personally, I’d rather see distinguishable characters with clean lines or no 3D rendering at all. After all, you’re supposed to be collecting hundreds of cool pets that are also cool-looking. Most of the time spent viewing your pets, or Spectrobes rather, you see them as indistinguishable blobs on the battlefield.

Now, there are places where you can get a better view of your Spectrobe. You can view it in the incubator and zoom in on it. But that meant you had to dig through a menu for your visual reward. Besides the graphics in battle and in the background, you get to see anime-style portraits of your characters during certain conversations. Like many other games that use this technique, it’s there to show the characters’ emotional states during dialogue. It’s a welcome touch for a game that otherwise has little depth in its story or dialogue.

As for music, Spectrobes has fairly standard RPG background music with a futuristic touch. It’s fitting and has a bit of depth to it, but if the tracks were any shorter it would be very repetitive. With static-sounding punches and blows, the sound effects aren’t any more spectacular. Still, it all gets the job done, and isn’t too annoying.

Spectrobes is an RPG/adventure game where you run around collecting ancient creatures called Spectrobes and use them to fight other monsters. The RPG part of the game is pretty shallow. Most random people don’t say anything new if you speak to them twice. Sometimes different people say the same thing, word for word. The story isn’t going to sweep you away, it’s straightforward and easy to digest. Clearly the intended audience is rather young. Even so, there’s an amusing sentence on the back of the box warning you that basic reading ability is needed to fully enjoy this game.

Basically in Spectrobes, you collect monsters as allies and level them up. “Child” Spectrobes that you find in the field must be raised in the incubator in order to obtain an adult that will aid you in battle. With only three stats - defense, attack, and health - customization is kept simple. The disconnect between battle and raising Spectrobes felt a little awkward to me. I’m sure I was supposed to want to collect and raise lots of different Spectrobes, but I rarely felt the need to run back and see how my incubating Spectrobes were doing. I made it through just fine with only a few changes to my Spectrobe team.

One thing that makes Spectrobes stand out from other monster collecting games is its excavation feature. You obtain new Spectrobes by digging them out of the ground. I’ll admit, it’s a neat little mini game. It’s also very simplistic. Yes, you have the option to buy lots of fancy tools to aid your digging tasks. However, all you really need to do is to learn how to quickly stroke the stylus across the object. Just do that and you’ll excavate every fossil without breaking it. It seems like the bonuses for excavating a fossil efficiently aren’t really worth it anyway. If you get tired of it, there is a tool that will allow you to instantly excavate your finds anyway.

For as simple as it is at times, Spectrobes does pack on the extra features. You can battle over wifi with several different options. You can also download official content such as videos. I’m sure one of the big hooks for kids will be the card input system. You can get plastic cards that have special holes punched in them. You lay the card on top of the touch screen, then touch the card at the designated points. Then like magic, you obtain a new monster or item. All of these different options are a big boost to Spectrobes replayability, and that may just be its most redeeming feature.

Spectrobes has a bit of a learning curve. Learning how to set up your battle team, evolve new Spectrobes for fighting, learn which monsters are weak against what: it’s just a lot to digest. It doesn’t help that you’re given instructions rather randomly. Even if you read the manual, you still need to find cubes that will give you access to certain features and you may be left wondering why something doesn’t work until you find them. Once you have the basics down, Spectrobes is fairly simple. It’s just a matter of leveling up your monsters and getting the hang of the rather slippery combat system.

Spectrobes is mainly about raising new and interesting creatures, but a few things deter that process. As flashy as they are, the menus are confusing. The descriptions they are given are sometimes misleading, so you may find yourself opening each menu item and stumbling around randomly to find things.

Spectrobes’ combat system is fairly unique among this genre of game. It’s done in real-time, on a 3D battlefield. You move around, dodging enemy attacks, while waiting for your action bar or special bar to charge up. Moving three characters at once can be a bit awkward, and it doesn’t help that the movement feels a bit slippery. It can be especially aggravating when you’re trying to turn one of your Spectrobes around for an attack, or when you’re trying to get one to move out of harm’s way. While it all could feel a bit more polished, it does get more interesting when you start putting in Spectrobes that have different types of attacks.

I can’t say Spectrobes is high up on the list of monster-collecting games. If you’ve got a buddy to play wirelessly with, it could make this game enjoyable for a lot longer. On its own, it just doesn’t seem to have the hook it needs to have. But overall, it’s a pretty good at what it tries to do.