Pokémon Champions

Pokémon Champions is the perfect starting point for anyone who wants to be the very best, making competitive Pokémon so much more accessible.

Pokémon has persisted for decades for many reasons – cute characters, a popular anime, lucrative trading cards – but chief among them is the game series' consistently satisfying turn-based battles. Pokémon Champions captures this highly refined system, cuts out much of the grinding necessary to train a viable team, and puts a thrilling competitive battling system in the hands of players around the world. The features around those battles, however, are often confusing and uneven, and des...

For better and worse, Pokemon Champions achieves its goal. It’s a competitive battling game that does a fantastic job of onboarding casual fans while streamlining much of what made constructing a battle-ready team in the mainline games so long-winded.

It's not just bugs and technical issues that are holding Pokémon Champions back. The game is limited to 3v3 battles, much to the chagrin of casual players everywhere who were hoping for a 6v6 format at the very least. A lot of held items are straight-up missing from Champions, which in theory should shake up the meta, but just ends up limiting it. The smaller Pokédex is also one of the most pressing problems at the moment, as many staples are not included at all, and cannot be transferred in via Pokémon HOME.

Pokemon Champions is easier to tolerate because its monetization model doesn't seem to be predatory or egregious, like what we see with many other free-to-play games. It delivers fun Pokemon battles that look great, but the game's biggest issue is the lack of content. Anyone that needs a little more than endless Pokemon battles isn't going to get a lot out of Pokemon Champions, but at least those that do decide to play it regularly won't have to break the bank to enjoy it.

Pokémon Champions feels like a work in progress, in a bad way. While the battles are fine and the QoL improvements are a godsend, there's a distinct feeling that the product is unfinished and lacks vital content that will be rationed over time. Throw in the bugs, and the result is a game that I might want to check out in six months or a year, but doesn't have enough quality content to attract me now.​​​​​​​