Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals

The series has improved significantly from the first game, and if Jupiter keeps this up I can see Spectrobes becoming an awesome series.

Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals is a pretty substantial improvement over its predecessor, offering a great 3D aesthetic, fast-paced combat, an interesting fossil digging mechanic, and fun multiplayer elements.

Disney Interactive's answer to Pokemon has a new perspective. [Dec 2008, p.104]

Improves the original game considerably by adding better combat, sharper graphics and deeper online features.

With the basic layout of the game's universe out of the way, the developers were able to refine and revise to their heart's content and make a respectable sequel.

A distinctive, pretty and involving RPG from developers Jupiter. Solve puzzles, train your character and monsters, enjoy a futuristic storyline across multiple worlds and meet a cast of interesting characters.

Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals has an enormous amount of features and content that will keep any gamer busy for quite sometime.

Spectrobes: Jenseits der Portale uses the whole spectrum of the NDS, no functions stay unused! Also the story, which is conceptualized to entertain kids, is quite good, even for adults.

No pun intended, but Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals is a game that gets more interesting the deeper you dig.

Disney’s new Pokémon-wannabe is a very rich and complex experience, but absolutely not as streamlined as it should be: it could steal your time like the best games in the genre, but maybe its intricacies are too much to endure.

Nevertheless, the sequel is a superior experience to its predecessor and the amount of content that can be found in-game across the decently-sized single player campaign is impressive-- hours upon hours can be poured into just excavating or just battling.

Spectrobes: beyond the portals has improved some parts of the previous game, the missions and excavation mechanism, however, are found to be linear and repetitious. The rich multiplayer mode, anyhow, offers many alternatives and there are tons of spectrobes waiting for your collection.

Beyond the Portals isn't a particularly long game and there's little reason to replay it; local and online multiplayer extend the life of this title if you really love the battle system.

The controls and camera do you no favors, and it could really benefit from more complexity in battle - we’d like to hammer buttons other than A once in awhile, please. But if the series continues to improve, it could find itself running down a certain electric yellow chinchilla in a few more years.

This sequel may go beyond the portals, but does little to go beyond its predecessor. A decent game, even if it's only marginally better than the first.

Compared to other "monster trainer" games, Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals is just too limited. The game itself is quite linear and fairly short, even as these things go, and while the collection aspect is fun, it doesn't hold a candle to anything in the Pokémon or Digimon franchises.

Still, with so many elements crammed into one package, it all comes together surprisingly well and Spectrobes is a series that continues to show promise.

At the end of the day, Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals is an interesting third-party Nintendo DS game that we would definitely recommend to lovers of Japanese RPG fans, due to the extensive dialogue and reminiscent gameplay to titles such as Final Fantasy and Pokémon.

Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals is not a bad game – it’s just an average game.

Given that there are several different planets to explore, myriad sidequests and optional bosses, and a ton of Spectrobes to collect, the micro-managing collectioneer will find plenty of game in Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals. It's just too bad that not one, but two clumsy combat systems and a cluttered UI detract from an excavation mechanic which provides some of the most fun that can be had with a touch screen and stylus.

Spectrobes: Beyond the Portal is engaging and fun, especially if you enjoyed the first game. However, it won't replace Pokemon.

The game comes with four cards, but at no point did the two-hour tutorial tell me how to upload the card data. Honestly, that’s one more fetch-quest I could do without anyway.

Frankly, there isn't much here that will keep older gamers occupied for the long haul, but there is some fun to be had with this action-RPG. That's not to say that Beyond the Portals is a bad game - it’s just an average title that has a lot of good ideas but fails to execute them in a consistently fun manner.

Problems are more plentiful than the collectible monsters in Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals, the epitome of how not to make a Poke-clone.