“This Nintendo Switch adventure will take you from island to island on an ecological survey, photographing Pokémon and building your own Pokémon Photodex!”

Pokemon has never been one of my favorite series, but back in the early 2000s it was huge for my older brother, cousins, and I because of the anime. The only games I’ve played have been Pokemon Coliseum 1 & 2, Emerald, Sword, and of course the original Pokemon Snap. All of these games have always lost me about halfway through simply due to turn based combat not being up my alley – but Snap is different.

You get to ride around seeing and taking pictures of Pokemon in the wild. Might sound boring, but it’s actually really fun. For some reason it always captured my interest, feeling like you were in the world of Pokemon and not being restricted to only battles. I never officially owned a copy of the game, so my memories were limited to that of when I borrowed the game at like 6 or 7 years old, and almost 20 years later you know I was absolutely going to pick up the sequel for myself.

It’s still very odd that Nintendo chose not to release a sequel to Snap on the Wii U – you know, a console that would make PERFECT SENSE with the gamepad as a camera. Regardless, how’s New Pokemon Snap? Well, I have mixed feelings. For starters, the game looks great. The different locations you travel to are all unique, there’s loads of Pokemon from Gen 1 to Gen 8 to find, and the controls are simple yet fluid. There’s many additional “side quest” photos to search for while traveling through all of the levels.

My issue with the game is that even though it nails the previously mentioned things, it feels like a grind. You don’t progress through a level and automatically move to the next, you have to go back and take more pictures eventually leveling up from version 1 to 3. In theory it provides incentive to go back and find things you may have missed before in order to have more surprises show up when you reach the 2nd or 3rd version of a level, but the score based system felt like I had to repeat the process multiple times. It made me put the game down for awhile in the beginning and I didn’t return for a couple months.

I did come back recently and finished it, the final few levels are really fun to check out. There’s also additional free content that was added into the game post-launch to play. I plan to max out all of the levels at some point down the line and in the end did enjoy New Pokemon Snap, but that score system brought my enjoyment to a halt more times than I would’ve liked.