Video Game Re­view: Poké­mon Snap

The re­turn of a long-awaited Poké­mon spin­off se­ries is just around the cor­ner, and it looks bet­ter than ever. 

Poké­mon Snap is not your av­er­age Poké­mon game; in lieu of catch­ing, train­ing, and bat­tling Poké­mon, Poké­mon Snap is all about do­ing what peo­ple would ac­tu­ally do in a world with Poké­mon: take pic­tures of them out in the wild do­ing cute, cool, or silly things. 

The game takes place in the Lentil Re­gion, one of the few to host mul­ti­ple re­gions’ worth of Poké­mon in one place. It casts you as a mem­ber of the Re­search Team, a col­lec­tion of in­di­vid­u­als ded­i­cated to record­ing in­for­ma­tion about Poké­mon around the re­gion. You do this with the help of a hov­er­craft called the Neo One and one se­ri­ously beefy cam­era. 

The game­play con­sists of the Neo One car­ry­ing the player-char­ac­ter through the lev­el’s en­vi­ron­ment on a fixed path, while the player uses a va­ri­ety of items and an­gles to get as good a pic­ture of any Poké­mon they see as they can. The items you have con­sist of fluff-fruits, an ap­ple-like fruit that causes the Poké­mon it is thrown to­wards to re­act in a cer­tain, pho­to­genic way. This in­cludes danc­ing, smil­ing, jump­ing, and any other ac­tiv­ity that would get an In­sta­gram cat pro­file hun­dreds of thou­sands of likes. 

Fur­ther­more, there are Il­lu­mina-Orbs, which high­light the Poké­mon they are used on in a lovely blue glow. These items are spe­cific to the Lentil Re­gion and have not ap­peared in any other game. The last abil­ity that has been shown thus far is the on­board mu­sic box. This al­lows the player to play a lit­tle mu­sic, which will cause nearby Poké­mon to dance or sing. These ac­tions set the scene for some of the higher grade pho­tos; this adds the re­play value in the game, as will be men­tioned later. 

The en­vi­ron­ments con­sist of deserts, oceans, forests, moun­tains, and plenty of oth­ers, and some blend into oth­ers within the same level. No mat­ter where you are, you will never know what you will en­counter. These courses also in­cen­tivize the player to re­play them of­ten, be­cause, for each Poké­mon in the game, there are four po­ten­tial pic­tures that could be taken: one, two, three, and four-star pho­tos. There are pre­cious few ways to snag all four qual­ity shots in one run, so wise use of these items and abil­i­ties is what will yield the high­est prob­a­bil­ity of the rare four-star shots. 

The Poké­mon Snap se­ries, which has only re­cently be­come a se­ries, got its start back in 1999 for the N64. That should demon­strate how much de­mand there was for this game, es­pe­cially con­sid­er­ing New Poké­mon Snap is not a re­mas­ter, but a di­rect se­quel to the first game. If any­thing, it gives me some hope that game de­vel­op­ers are still pay­ing at­ten­tion to their au­di­ences and what they are ask­ing for. Games like these are the ones that give me faith in the game de­vel­op­ing in­dus­try and dis­pel the nag­ging sus­pi­cion that they are all soul­less cor­po­ra­tions in­tent on mak­ing a quick buck from min­i­mal ef­fort and their fans’ nos­tal­gia. New Poké­mon Snap is re­leas­ing on April 30, and, though it seems more like a va­ca­tion than an ad­ven­ture of a Poké­mon game, it is go­ing to make so many fans happy, that I can­not help but join in on the ex­cite­ment.