In the midst of the success of the Detective Pikachu movie, Pokemon Rumble Rush has started coming out for mobile devices. Joining the port of Pokemon Shuffle and Pokemon Quest, this game brings yet another Pokemon spin-off to mobile.

Formerly called Pokeland, Pokemon Rumble Rush is the latest installment in the Pokemon Rumble sub-series. In this sub-series, instead of leading a team of Pokemon as a human or playing as a Pokemon, you play as Toy Pokemon, these wind-up bobblehead looking versions of Pokemon. Instead of a traditional RPG structure, you duke things out in simple beat em’ up gameplay.

Movesets are condensed to just one attack and the only real RPG element present is switching out to Pokemon with attacks that are effective against whatever you’re going up against. You go down a gauntlet of Toy Pokemon, who sometimes allow themselves to get picked up to join your growing repertoire, and fight a big boss at the end.

In this installment, you progress through the game using Guide Feathers to jump between areas and fight Super Bosses to advance. Super Bosses are bosses that fight on a time limit and require you to meet a set of requirements before you can challenge them, pushing you to play a bunch of stages and jump around until you get what you need. Thankfully, the game does not seem to have a stamina system like many mobile games, so there isn’t too much holding you back from doing so.

The game makes an interesting decision in that when you go to new areas, you can only use Toy Pokemon found in those areas. The justification being that your tutorial friend doesn’t want to introduce new species into areas where they don’t belong. Aside from mirroring real-world concerns of invasive species, it allows the game to maintain some sense of challenge by stopping you from immediately bringing in powerful Toy Pokemon.

Additional new features to this game are ore refinery and gears. You’ll sometimes find ore that can be refined in real-time that basically acts like a loot box, giving you a bunch of goodies including gears. With gears, you can increase the stats of your Pokemon or summon a friendly Pokemon into a fight to throw in a supporting move.

Pokemon Rumble Rush is a free-to-start game (aka there are microtransactions) and at the time of writing, it’s only available on Android in Australia, but will likely be available in more regions and devices soon.

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