If you could sum up my childhood in one word, that word would be ”Digimon”, so it is safe to say I was beyond excited for this game. Also, I didn’t get to play Digimon ReArise so I was determined to make up for that lose with this new release.
I installed the game as soon as it became available and…well, let’s talk about it…
Digimon Up is a mobile game that combines automated battling with the gacha system. You start with a Digimon partner, obtain Support Digimon, Skill Cards and gear and level them up in order to progress.
The game is divided into “stages”. As you defeat weaker enemies you reach the boss. After beating the stage you go to the next one and after beating a certain number of them the world map expands and you unlock new stages, with different setting and different types of enemies.
If you fail, the stage starts again, until you are strong enough to go to the next level.
I’ll talk about the “gameplay” in a second, but let’s start from the beginning.
When you boot the game you get to customize the appearance of your tamer character. There are many options for skin and eye color, but very few for everything else. This may seem strange, but you will soon realize that the appearance is completely irrelevant. As you play, you will get different gear – clothes, accessories and hairstyles for your character, which will give different boosts to your Digimon and thus you will use whatever is the strongest. If blonde hair is stronger than red hair, you will be blonde. If Patamon suit is stronger than a blue shorts than you will wear a Patamon suit.
I, personally, don’t care about customization, but it is a little weird to introduce such an option only to scrap it a minute later.
After that, you select your partner and you can choose any Digimon form Digimon Adventure, Digimon Adventure 02 and Digimon Tamers.
Then, you are greeted by Terrierimon Assistant and Agumon Expert who walk you through the game mechanics. And there are quite a few of them.
In addition to upper mentioned Support Digimon, Skill Cards and gear there are Dungeons, Camps, Meat Field (where you grow your Digimon’s food), Daily and EX Missions, Passes, Player vs Player option, The Memory mini game and so on. You are not introduced to all of these at once and nothing here is too complicated, but I honestly found it kind of unintuitive and hard to keep up with, especially because you will find yourself just mindlessly clicking on stuff without giving any of them much thought.
And that’s the biggest problem with this game! You don’t actually do anything!
The battles are completely automated. You don’t select moves or anything else, they just play out by themselves. If you collected enough strong things you win and if you didn’t, back to the gacha system.
The game is not completely passive, though. At the bottom of the screen is something called a Hologram Device. Every ten or so seconds you’ll need to click on it and it will give you a new item. If it is stronger than what you have, you will equip it to your character and if not, it gets sold. The game will tell you if it is stronger or not, so you don’t actually have to look into it yourself.
Your Digimon will occasionally need some food and you will need to click on a little food image that will appear above it.
You will also need to get more Support Digimon and Skill Cards. The more you get of the same ones the stronger they become.
There are many of these and it is impossible to analyze them all by yourself so the game allows you to automatically select the strongest ones to be used. I tried to switch things up myself but I always got worse results that way.
This system is very disappointing, but there is something weirdly compelling about. Instead of just letting the game do its own thing, you have to be an active participant and pay at least some attention to the screen. Because of that I don’t hate the game.
Although, it’s still not good.
Here’s the thing – it could have worked. The battles may play out by themselves, which is not something I’m used to, but if it was up to you to choose a strategy before the battle and adjust it based on the results, it could still offer an engaging gameplay.
However, there is no strategy here and no personal choices.
You are incentivized to use the strongest Support Digimon so you won’t build a team based on your favorites. The evolution lines are linear and there are no personal choices there either. The strongest cards and Digimon are selected for you so you don’t have to make any adjustments based on which enemy you are facing. Their type, attacks and other things don’t matter. You can’t choose a different path through the world, avoiding certain enemies until you are stronger or simply exploring things on your own. The stages are repetitive and there are too many of the same ones before you get to see something new. I had just started playing and I already got tired of Okuwamon.
The Missions are uninteresting as well. Most of them will be fulfilled as you progress and you won’t have to read them and plan your play around them. You will just click on everything you can click on to collect stuff and that’s it.
There are Dungeons build around specific Digimon, but they play out exactly like regular stages, just with different background and different enemies.
This game is free to play, but of course the company has to make money somehow, so there are adds in it. Watching them is not mandatory, but you will find yourself doing that anyway in order to get more cards and Digimon, especially early on before you gather a larger amount of gems and other in game currencies. At first it might seem like you don’t have enough of anything, but this will change after an hour or two of gameplay and you won’t need to spend any money.
Some things are not properly explained. For example, you can level up the Hologram Device in order to receive better items more frequently. It is mentioned in a tutorial but you will forget about it by the time you actually have to do it. I figured this out by reading a Reddit post.
There is a chat in the game. It will always display the newest comment though you can see the rest by opening it up. Comment are in different languages, but there is an option to translate them to English. To my knowledge it is impossible to directly respond to a specific comment so I’m not sure how useful this feature is.
I played the game on a release day and there were many error codes though they didn’t seem to effect anything. The game ran just fine. I only had a problem getting to the stage 10 – I had to exit the game and after opening it up again it moved me to the stage 11 so I’m not sure what was up with that.
Not sure if this is relevant, but the game can’t be played offline as it will tell you it can’t connect to the servers.
The art and music in this game are awesome. I particularly like a Digivolution sequence which includes a version of Brave Heart. One random thing I want to mention is this Skill Card which causes a huge pile of meat to fall on the enemy which I thought was pretty funny.
I played this game for about three hours and I didn’t hate it. There are many things to collect in it and that gives it a certain dynamic, but it is repetitive and, ultimately, unengaging and I don’t see myself playing again.