DIGIMON WORLD : DATA SQUAD (PS) CODE NAME : DWS

SUMMARY

As Marcus, it is up to you to find the missing kids and defeat the deadly Seven Demon King and their evil minion. Team up with a large variety of Digimon to battle evil and solve complex puzzles together. As you and your Digimon partners increase in skill and find new items, your Digimon can be upgraded throungh levelling up and Digivolution. Control over 140 Digimon and evolve them to be powerful enough to save the world!

REVIEW

You'll start off playing as Data Squad member Marcus Damon, whose Digimon is the dinosaur-like Agumon. But before long, you'll be playing as the entire Data Squad, providing you with a small party of Digimon with which to fight. With your party in tow, you'll be sent to various locations to wander around aimlessly and get into random encounters with the same handful of enemies every few steps until you somehow find your way to the end, where you'll usually find a bigger boss Digimon to fight. After that, you'll head back to base to load up on items and head off to your next destination.

Your Digimon will evolve over time, and there's a pretty huge number of different evolutionary paths each Digimon can take. You can influence this process by fulfilling specific conditions, which can include reaching certain experience levels and having an encounter with a specific enemy. The strengths and weaknesses of your party can change dramatically through evolution, which would have been totally interesting, if the game didn't basically play itself.

Perhaps worst of all is the fact that all of this plays out at a snail's pace. The environments are needlessly serpentine, and without a map to refer to, it's nearly impossible to tell one bland screen from the next. The frequency of the random encounters doesn't help, and once you're actually in combat, it seems like a single attack takes forever to play out. This is not because there's so much going on, but because the game pads the encounters out with needless pauses and constant camera angle changes. When you've got three Digimon on each side, it can take several minutes just to make your way through a single round of combat. On top of all that, Digimon World: Data Squad isn't much of a game to look at, with cheap, repetitive environments, enemies, and attack animations.

SCREENSHOT

 MY RATING : 5.5  |  PRICE : RM10