Pokemon Dash

The Short


Pros
- Has 25 tracks, and you can import tracks based off your pokemon from Ruby/Sapphire or FireRed/LeafGreen
- Has a fair number of pokemon in it

Cons
- Is a full price, glorified, branded tech demo for the Nintendo DS
- "Gameplay" is nonexistent, and they didn't even bother to try and mix up their awful formula
- Graphics look awful, even for an early NDS title.
- It also sounds awful. Bonus.
- Why does this game exist? It's nothing but a trick for mothers or little children who want Pokemon, but then they get it for Christmas and after playing it for five minutes realize it's a trick and swear revenge against this world that has so betrayed them, and next thing you know they are committing arson and knocking down mailboxes. So basically this game is the cause of school shootings.

They really are trying to get me to hate Pokemon, aren't they. 

The Long

So listen: I like the DS, and I like Pokemon. I don't mind spin-off games if they are still ok games (even though I bagged on Hey You, Pikachu! it isn't offensive to me, just poor). This game, Pokemon Dash, offends me. It offends me as a Pokemon fan, it offends me as somebody who has to earn his own money to buy games, and most importantly it offends me as a gamer. Pokemon Dash is utter garbage that shouldn't exist, and the fact they pawned it off at full price as an early Nintendo DS game (when the system was in dire need of some games) just makes this whole thing worse.

Now that that is out of the way, here is my completely unbiased, objective review of Pokemon Dash.

Oh my gosh this game is so horrible.  

So the point of this game is to race Pikachu against every other pokemon in existence, and by every other I mean like a few dozen at most. Pikachu runs in a stright line and you have next to no control over him, besides motivating him to go faster. How do you do this? By scratching the bottom of the screen as fast as you can with the DS stylus. Yes. That is literally the entire game. You quickly swipe in a direction, Pikachu goes that way (faster if you swipe Fast) and then you either win or you lose. Most of it is automated. This is the whole game.

The whole top screen is completely useless. There's a "radar" which is useless, a current ranking (which could have been done on the bottom screen) and nothing else. The bottom screen is filled with ugly, awful graphics as you watch Pikachu from your observation chopper, ordering his every move. There are a few mixups, like certain terrain requires you to pick up an item before crossing them or else you'll slow to a crawl, but other than that you just...swipe. That's it. 

This is one ugly-ass game. 

You have 25 courses, and you can import your pokemon from the GBA games and it'll make races out of them, which makes me wonder why they didn't just include them in the game, since there aren't a lot of tracks here anyway. Instead you have to own both games, and if you own a GBA pokemon game and have it in your DS you should probably just be playing it instead of this crap.

The pokemon sounds are all annoying. They aren't as bad in an actual Pokemon game because you don't hear them all that often, but you hear them all the time in this monstrosity. The graphics, as I said before, look completely awful. I'd rather play Hey You, Pikachu! from start to finish than boot this awful thing up again.

Wow, Pikachu, I never realized you were such a Warrior Poet. 

I don't want to talk about this game anymore. There is nothing redeemable about it. It's essentially just a DS tech demo, and they should have given it away for free. Or better yet, just not released it. Instead they put it out with the Pokemon logo, inspiring false hopes that it might actually have something good inside of its plastic box.

It doesn't.

Zero out of five stars. 

"Mewoth, that's right!"