byJoe Pring
For better and worse, Pokemon Champions achieves its goal. It’s a competitive battling game that does a fantastic job of onboarding casual fans while streamlining much of what made constructing a battle-ready team in the mainline games so long-winded.
What Champions isn’t is a spiritual successor to the Stadium series, or a game that’s intended to be your next big Pokemon fix until Winds and Waves ushers in Gen 10.
This is a battle sim through and through, designed to give competitive players a central place to call home while also giving newcomers all the tools they need to dip their toes in Pokemon’s PvP endgame.
Champions being free-to-play removes the biggest barrier of all, but in doing so, also opens the gate to a monetization system that runs counter to its goal of opening competitive Pokemon to the masses.
Pokemon Champions screenshots
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What is Pokemon Champions about?
You’re a Trainer recruited by the prestigious Cordy to assume managerial duties of a Gym, because he’s pushing 50 years in the business and looks more than ready for retirement.
Unsurprisingly, it’s a paper-thin story that even Champions seems self-aware of, allowing you to skip the introductions and get straight to battling.
The only problem is that it could lead to the assumption that Champions hides an unfolding story, but it doesn’t. Your role as Gym manager is to recruit (or transfer) Pokemon, beef them up with trinkets, optimize their stats, and fight other players to rank up.
Striking a balance
What Champions does best is ensure every player, new, old, lapsed, you name it, starts on an even playing field.
If you don’t have years’ worth of min-maxed Pokemon primed and ready to transfer over from HOME, Champions’ recruitment system allows you to rent or permanently keep one selected from a random pool, and train it up with earned Victory Points to be just as viable.
Pokemon Champions cuts out the boring bits to unite casuals and tryhards
Everything we know about Pokemon Champions: Gameplay, platforms & details
The grind of buying Vitamins, earning Battle Points, levelling, and making Poke Dollars just to fund a single Pokemon’s growth as you would in the mainline games is thankfully all handled by Victory Points here.
This simplification results in a lack of variety elsewhere, however. To get fresh blood into Pokemon’s competitive ecosystem, sacrifices have been made. Missing meta-defining items and a small roster of around 200 Pokemon make Champions feel both underbaked and streamlined at the same time.
Ultimately, there’s no pleasing everyone. Champions largely manages to strike an excellent balance for a game intended to evolve, but not everything hits.
Raising questions
It costs nothing to download and play Champions, but if you want access to everything, you’ll need to pay up. Certain gameplay items, including all-important Mega Stones, can only be obtained by dropping $10 for a Premium Battle Pass.
Others can only be obtained by owning other games, while quality-of-life features, such as more storage space, music tracks, and team slots, require a monthly or annual subscription to maintain.
None of this is new player-friendly, and charging real money to unlock items that many will already own in other games is a daring decision, to say the least.
These oddities, combined with performance that’s locked to 30fps, even on Switch 2, push Champions into feeling unpolished.
Battles and menus feel choppy as a result, and certainly lack the smoothness of Legends Z-A and Scarlet & Violet’s enhanced Switch 2 version.
Verdict
At launch, Pokemon Champions feels a bit too much like a proof of concept. The onboarding process for players unfamiliar with the ins and outs of competitive battling is fantastic.
That anyone trying out the game requires zero investment in the franchise to forge a meta team is its biggest achievement, bar none. Simplifying ancient mechanics introduced across multiple generations of the RPGs comes in a close second.
Elsewhere, though, Champions feels like it still needs work. It would massively benefit from smoother performance, a review of its puzzling monetization, and a toning down of its grind, which, while more straightforward than the mainline games, requires sizable time investment just to unlock everything.
Dexerto|Verdict
Review of Pokemon Champions
Good
Pokemon Champions has a fantastic onboarding process for players unfamiliar with the ins and outs of competitive battling, but it still feels like it needs work. It would massively benefit from smoother performance, a review of its puzzling monetization, and a toning down of its grind, which, while more straightforward than the mainline games, requires sizable time investment just to unlock everything.
3Review Scoring
Joe Pring|Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2
