The game initially drew me in with its innovative use of the DS’s features–we especially liked the plastic overlay cards with numbered holes that unlock new monsters–but then it stranded me in the land of boredom with shallow game play and repetitive mechanics. Spectrobes are fossilized monsters. To collect them you must search the environments, dig them up, and then help them evolve to an adult form to fight for you.
Excavating the fossils is the play free pc games game’s strength, which isn’t saying much because it quickly grows repetitive and cumbersome. You must use the DS’s touch pad to break through layers of dirt and then drill through rock to remove the fossils. The control scheme is intuitive but it ultimately feels like a gimmick. To make things worse the Spectrobes have less personality than a can of soup so there is little incentive to continue catching them.
As it is, Spectrobes is little more than a dull game of collecting fossils.