Ooblets Review

ign.com:

Have you ever moved to a new town and, what do you know, there’s an abandoned farm ready for you to claim and revitalize all on your own? With adorable creatures to collect and eccentric townsfolk to befriend, Ooblets doesn’t follow a completely unfamiliar formula. But while the unique twists it adds to that structure aren’t very deep, they did keep me smiling for the roughly 30 hours it took to finish the main story.

You arrive as the newest citizen of Badgetown, a down-on-its-luck community you immediately start working to improve that lives in harmony with charming creatures called Ooblets. Though they’re all little and very cute, their designs vary pretty widely. You have Ooblets like Dumbirb, an actual small birb… bird friend; Clomper, a round, fluffy puppy-looking chum with stick horns; and Firmo, one of a few robots on the roster.

Rather than being caught, you grow your own Ooblets right out of the ground, who will then act as your cutie-patootie farm assistants. Of course, they serve a higher purpose than that too – Ooblets are also used to battle on your behalf in order to earn new Ooblet seeds or to solve a plethora of local problems. Violence isn’t the answer in Ooblets though – dance battles are. It’s a clever twist that removes the questionable ethics present in some other monster collecting games.

Unfortunately, the dance battles themselves never evolved enough to live up to their creative theming. Battles play out as card-based fights, where different cards represent fanciful moves your Ooblets can perform, with silly names like Takey Tap Tap or One Step Pep. Each Ooblet has its own set of signature move cards, which makes collecting all the different species extra fun as I never knew when a new