Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon, review, 3DS: 'Charmingly fun'

Pokémon Company - £29.99

You’ve woken up and you’re a Pokémon – what happens next? This is the essential high concept sentence of Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon.

What actually happens next is that you click through a fair amount of dialogue and fight your way through underground dungeons with strategy board game movement and a rouge-like attack.

The first thing that you really do is answer a series of personality quiz type questions – these decide which Pokémon your protagonist has mysteriously transformed into and are an oddly good idea, the questions are suitably banal for a Pokémon game but they give you an extra element of attachment to your little guy – the kind of attachment you might have for your zodiac or something else that doesn’t actually tell you anything about your personality.

The dungeons get progressively harder, with the wild Pokémon that you have to battle getting stronger and more dangerous the further along you go, adding a bit of challenge to the whole thing – the strategy-movement stops it from being entirely repetitive too.

Apart from that, the dialogue moments are drawn-out and tedious at times but in such an inoffensive way that you really can’t complain.

Pokémon games are one the stalwarts of Nintendo, one of the series that makes buying new handhelds a fairer purchase.

The dungeon model is now a large series but still a surprising one if you're more unaware of the Pokémon spin-offs (this one was the first to really hit my radar) - the idea of playing as a Pokémon protagonist takes a moment of getting used to but the solid gameplay and charmingly fun story means it continues a happy road of Pokémon games.