Fossil Fighters Review

The newest rip-off of a rip-off of Nintendo's Pokémon by Nintendo has finally arrived: Fossil Fighters! This game is a blatant rip-off of Disney's Spectrobes (and, naturally, Spectrobes 2: Beyond the Portal), the concept of both games being to dig up and revive fossils, just to make them fight.

First off, the story is nearly non-existant, and it doesn't happen very fast when you do see it. Occasionally you do something that will throw the main story forward, but it's not all that common after the prologue.

The aformentioned combat is not as fun as it sounds - it's actually quite as bad as it can get, but it's spiced up with different spots on the board. It's played like a board game, you have four spots where you can move your vivosaurs (basically just dinosaurs...), one main spot, two support spots, and a retreating spot. At the beginning of a turn your player is given a certain amount of points, and each attack costs a certain number of points. The main vivosaur can attack any enemy in the enemy's line-up, but while in the support spots you can only attack the other player's main vivosaur. Other than that it's just tapping choices on the touch screen, there's not much else to it - even the rock-paper-scissors scheme found in pokémon is non-existant.

Although combat is a major theme in most games, and it certainly is in this one, the main point is to revive fossils. This consists of going out to parks, using a radar to find rocks or fossils, digging, and going back to the city to clean them off. Let's start off with the radar part - it's not very great. Every so often you will find a rock in the ground, which doesn't do much but provide some annoyance. The digging consists of pressing the 'a' button every once in a while, at a certain spot. Next, you go to the fossil center and try to clean it off. Needless to say, that wasn't very fun either. You have two useful tools - a hammer and a drill. You also have an x-ray tool, but it doesn't really do anything useful. The hammer does too much damage, and the drill does almost none. It's a very insensitive process, especially for something made by Nintendo.

The graphics can be hit and miss. In the battle sequences, it's reminiscent of Playstation X games, in fact - it all is. The battle sequences are quite beautiful, actually, although it's not very seamless. The walking around parts of the game are pretty much the opposite - it all flows very well, but everything looks stupid. Nintendo seems to have forgotten that we have joints in our elbows and knees, and that our necks can move.

I haven't noticed it too much, but the sound is pretty good. The fact that it's not very noticeable is probably a good thing, actually, but it also doesn't stand out in the way it did in games such as The World Ends With You.

All in all, I would not buy this game. It's pretty clunky, the controls are somewhat non-responsive, and it's just not very fun. If you want a fun fossil-digging game, go with Spectrobes - it does everything this game does and more, but better.