Trying to be the very best

Without a doubt when it comes to the creature collecting genre; Nintendo does it best with its Pokémon series. By now the formula is legendary right, you are a young kid who has a horrible mother who sets you loose into the world with the help of a crazy professor who gives you a wild creature for you to order around in fights to get stronger. While the last few main line games have tried to shake up the formula it largely remains the same, which is why for me the game Adore was such a breath of fresh air.

MSRP: $19.99
Platforms: Xbox (reviewed), PlayStation, Switch, PC

Adore features monster-taming just like Pokémon but instead of just giving commands, players will use their creatures as attacks; which for someone like me who usually craves action this was perfect. Adore features a simple – yet effective plot to serve its monster taming needs. Set in the world of Gaterdrik, two dragon gods; Draknaar and Ixer, personify the ‘Good vs Evil’ and in a twist Evil win and Draknaar is slain…until he isn’t. Turns out they pull thee ole “Voldmort Design” and by that, I mean turns out a piece of Draknaar’s soul becomes lodged inside the playable character Lukha. Holy, Holly Horacrux this aint good because Lukha is a young Adorer, this world’s take on the monster tamer, and with his newfound draconic power he decides that hes gonna finish Ixer for good.

How does Lukha plan on doing that, well by catchin’ them all; that’s how and as I said above Adore does something different than others in the genre. Combat takes place in real-time as does actually catching these creatures. The catching system is simple-yet effective, players will press a bumper on controller and have to stand in an area until its full to complete the catch. Just as in Pokémon it behooves players to damage new creatures before they try and capture them as they are wild and will attack when approached. Combat is where I found the most fun, instead of just giving commands to a creature in a battle each creature is mapped to a button. When pressed the creature will emerge with an attack or ability, at first this seems overly simple especially with most of the early creatures begin defeated with one or two attacks. But as players level up and expand their roster, they will find synergies between creatures which are passive buffs that will become essential in late game play.

Another big thing which is nice is instead of a large open world, in Adore the world is divided into nice size chunks to explore; which players will do a lot of in order to catch all of the various creatures that inhabit the world. Sigh, I am sad to say that Adore plays very much like a roguelike and does feature upgrades that players will lose per run. Also, while I always found fun with the strategic combat the mission structure will get a little tedious and repetitive after hours of play.

I enjoyed Adore for the things that it did differently with its creature collecting and real-time combat, I could have done without the roguelike systems. But even with that going against it I still had a great time playing Adore, collecting creatures, theory crafting for that perfect team and the combat system still has its hooks in me, despite the overused roguelike system.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.