Review by: Brandon "Jewel Rock" Cackowski-Schnell

Depending on how you look at it, Fossil Fighters is either a watered down rip-off of Pokemon and Spectrobes (which is itself a rip-off of Pokemon) or the game is a good entrance point to the whole creature battling genre providing a detailed enough battle system to keep things interesting but devoid of all of the incredibly complex underpinnings that serve to turn off as many people as it attracts. I tend to view it as the latter making the game a good one for those that want a simpler creature battling adventure however die-hard Pokebuffs may be turned off by the game's simplistic approach.

The game's plot is nothing you haven't seen before. You're a Fossil Fighter looking to be the best Fossil Fighter you can be. As you go about your business of collecting fossils and reanimating them to fight for your amusement you run afoul of other bad Fossil Fighters who a) doubt your meager abilities and b) never heard of a punch in the nose as a way of deterring meddling children. Eventually you fight said bad folks, prevail and they run off both surprised and disgusted with their defeat at the hands of a lesser foe. You then fight in a staged battle to achieve the next level of fossil fighting greatness. Cue next act.

As the story isn't the most entertaining yarn you'll ever come across, no doubt a side effect of the game's clearly younger skewing target audience, luckily the game play is absorbing even if there isn't a whole lot of originality here. All of the battling is done with vivasaurs, scientifically reanimated dinosaurs. As you progress through the game's story you'll be able to visit new dig sites where you use your sonar to find fossils. By taking the rocks back to your lab and cleaning them off via a touchscreen mini-game you uncover various dinosaur parts. If you clean off a dinosaur's head you can revive the thunder lizard and you'll have a new vivasaur to add to your collection. Clean off some legs or arms and you'll either store them until you find the matching head or the parts will be integrated into existing vivasaurs making them stronger in battle as well as giving them additional attacks. In addition to finding new fossil you can also clean off rocks containing fossils you already own in the hopes of doing a better cleaning job thereby further strengthening your combatants.

The cleaning mini-game is addicting and the carrot of a better vivasaur is a good enough incentive however if you'd rather not spend your time whacking a rock with a mallet you can either sell your fossil rock for some change or you can drop the rock off to be cleaned by your robot helper. The robot's cleaning ability levels up as it watches you clean so there's still some incentive to clean by yourself. If you find that you're cleaning efforts didn't surpass previous attempts you'll automatically donate the fossil to the Fossil Center nabbing you donation points which can be redeemed for new dino-parts. All of these options add up to reward the player for whichever path they decide to take with their newfound rocks.

As there are no random encounters in Fossil Fighters, fights usually come about either by approaching someone and talking to them or by finding a new fossil rock that has been found by another fighter at the same time. Oddly enough these fighters appear to live in the ground, hoarding their new toys from deep in the Earth's crust and only come above ground to engage you in battle. Fight the other fighter and you get to keep the rock, lose and it's back to the hotel for you with nothing to show for your efforts. The lack of random encounters helps keep the game moving along, especially when you're tired of cleaning and want to make progress in the story.

When walking about you'll have a team of three primary vivasaurs and two reserves that you carry with you at all times. At the beginning of every battle you'll see what creatures you'll be going up against as well as be given the option to switch around the creatures in your team to best take advantage of the rock-paper-scissor elemental battle system that appears to be constitutionally mandated for all creature battle games.

During the fight you'll have one vivasaur in the attack zone and two in the support zones. Support zone creatures give bonusus to creatures in the attack zone, or take away from enemy creatures. Support zone creatures can attack but at a penalty unless they're of the long range type leaving your creature in the attack zone to doing most of the damage as well as bearing the brunt of the attacks.

Which attacks can be used is determined on how many fossil points you have at the beginning of the round with stronger, combo attacks requiring more points. It's an accessible system that still lends itself to some strategy. The fighter with the weakest creatures get to go first so they don't get decimated in the first round and any defeated vivasaur has its fossil points automatcally added to the remaining combatants at the next turn in an attempt to give the fighter who has lost some beasties a chance at victory.