I grew up watching Bakugan in the morning. I loved the show, from its concept to the story and the characters that the series had to offer. It also had some mystery in it surrounding the plot of the different seasons. I really hoped that the game could give me this same feeling as the show did when I was a kid.
A departure from the animated series
The game is based around the new anime series that came out, which is a reboot of the original series, Bakugan Battle Brawlers. The new series is called Bakugan, with season 1 (Battle Planet) already out and season 2 (Armored Alliance) finishing up by the end of this year.
The story is separated from the animated series. So it is not needed to have watched the series before to understand. But that said, the story is pretty lackluster. The pacing of the game is really slow. You just walk around, just doing some fetch quests with no rhyme or reason behind it other than making you play the game longer. You need to go from one part to the other part of the map just to continue the main story which isn’t all that great. This with the fact that every time you walk to a new area, in or outside, you get a 10-second loading screen, makes the whole experience even worse and really annoying. I would have liked it if they included animated cutscenes to the game to give the story and game the feel that the anime gives us. Instead, we got in-game cutscenes with still frames of the characters and text (without any voice acting) to read through.
Basic RPG Lite battle system
Choose your 3 Bakugan than you want on your team. With a total of 80+ different Bakugan to collect with 6 different attributes in total. Each attribute has its strengths and weaknesses. You as the player walk around collection Baku-cores. These cores power-up your Bakugan to use your Baku-Abilities. The ability triggers a battle cutscene, that is pretty poorly executed. Once you used the ability, it’s on cooldown. Stronger abilities take more energy and are harder to charge up.
The goal is to get the opponent’s health to zero to knock out the Bakugan. Some abilities can stun the opponent, heal yourself, buff you or de-buff your opponent etc. There is not much depth to attacking, it’s just having the luck to be near the next Baku-core to get more energy. There is more depth in choosing the best abilities to equip to do as much damage as possible. But this doesn’t take away from the fact that the core gameplay in battles isn’t fun. It gets really repetitive really quickly. Lucky that you can skip the battles but then the game is nothing more than an empty shell.
Lack of world-building
The world is really static, for example, there are cars and trees that don’t move at all. The framerate when walking around is solid but when in battles it will dip quite often to around 20fps. Sound design is also pretty poor, the sounds of the Bakugan are terrible. This is not the first Bakugan ever made. Bakugan Defenders of the Core was a way better game. If you’ve played that game before and loved it and think it will scratch the same itch you will be disappointed.
Conclusion
Bakugan Champions of Vestroia is a really bad game. It’s not designed well, it lacks overall purpose both in the story as in the side-quests, has a bad engine with lackluster gameplay and a static, dull world and characters that are far from the animated series. The game is definitely not worth the asking price of 50 bucks. Even if you are a fan of the series you should rather spend your money on the plethora of better games out there for Nintendo Switch.
