Temtem is a valiant effort at reproducing the Pokémon formula on a variety of platforms while still offering its original experience. It falters in that by trying to live service and mmo the experience, the balance and the intrigue of what is happening gets stale. I think what would have carried me further into it is if it introduced tems more quickly, or a better variety. The designs are hit or miss if they grab my attention or not, and because grinding is a large part of this, you get stuck wandering the same areas a ton with the same tems. The difficulty is welcome, but it feels as though they balanced it in a way that makes you constantly read guides, or have to re-commit pokemon-esque knowledge to my memory, on top of some (key thought: my own taste) monotony with the aforementioned landscapes and tems. Nothing is awful about the game, just these elements didn’t click with me, and I think this is may be a Pokémon killer for a lot of folks, especially in that it’s a stable well functioning game. It also has some QOL that would be welcome in Pokémon, but is not as easily navigable in its locations or maps. Which is good in some ways, but helps the problems.

Copied from Steam review:

This is EXACTLY the game I've been looking for for so long. I grew up loving Pokemon, but as an adult became annoyed at how easy, uninspiring, and straight up same-old their games had become. I wanted something challenging and engaging, and Temtem is exactly that.

They've addressed pretty much every single issue I've had with Pokemon and either removed it or improved it. Oh how 2v2's and the stamina system ALONE make this such a better experience. The fact that this is still only in early access and I've been able to put in this much time and have this much fun says a lot.

If you've been hungering for something new from Pokemon, this will satisfy your cravings immensely and immediately.

Temtem is the best Pokémon game ever made. There are so many reasons why I like this game more than Pokémon titles, especially the modern ones (since the 6th gen).

I'm gonna list the main aspects here:
- there is ACTUALLY A GODDAMN STORY
- coop gameplay right from the start
- great combat design without randomness
- superb Temtem design
- no paywall (you can get EVERY Temtem without having to pay for two different versions)
- brilliant soundtrack
- enjoyable quests
- different islands
- higher difficulty
- cool raid design
- great breeding system
- useful online mechanics
- cool level system for Temtems
- Lunas (shinys) look amazing

Overall, this is better than Pokémon in every aspect imaginable, except nostalgia.
Apart from that, this is by FAR the better experience and I absolutely love this game.

It's actually really fun but ran into 2 hiccups I didn't expect:

First, there's the fact that despite me not playing Pokemon with any real fanaticism, I found it's hard to replace my love of the dumb creatures. Some of these are quite cute, but just can't cut it.

Even stranger still though is my second knock - this game is hard, and I like challenging games, but something in my brain is hardwired to want Pokemon and Pokemon adjacent games to offer little challenge. I like them because they're a relaxing time. The challenge makes my brain need to work a lot and honestly I think I'd rather play an smt or persona game if I wanted challenging turn-based combat.

I realize both these problems are hugely subjective but it really kept the game from "clicking" for me.

A surprising anti-imperialist story and a bright vivid world are just enough to actually make this a viable contender in the world of monster collecting games. What really holds this game back is actually how the game is scaled to work as an MMORPG.

This game is noticeably more difficult than basically every other creature collector there is on the market right now. But the difficulty is only heightened by how difficult it is to level new Tems you will add to your party. Trainers and Dojo leaders are typically a much higher level than wild Tems. But there's no area to grind trainers. As such you're left with fighting wild Tems to grind but the exp gain is horrifically low y comparison.

Grinding 12 hours fighting Tems I can one shot just to get one member of my team to lvl 100 so I can have a slightly better shot at beating the final boss of the story isn't really the way I'd like to go.

This game has been in early access a long time. It feels as though the devs are using this as an excuse to no longer support story expansions to the game and instead focus on a lackluster battle pass and pvp.

The appeal of something like Pokemon is how expansive the world is, and this game is really missing the mark by not going forward with expanding theirs.

This game is currently in the Humble Choice for July 2023, and this is part of my coverage of the bundle. If you are interested in the game and it's before August 1st, 2023, consider picking up the game as part of the current monthly bundle.

Massively Multiplayer Pokemon.

TemTem doesn’t hide its influences, your neighbor who is a professor has you choose from three TemTems. Your rival then challenges you with her TemTem. You then go on a major journey, collecting new TemTem in the grass, capturing them by weakening them and then using Temcards, and so on.

The thing is, everything TemTem does is almost exactly like Pokemon, which is a good thing. There are a lot of attempts to imitate the formula, but TemTem comes the closest and adds the ability to do a Massive Multiplayer game as well.

But the thing is… they shouldn’t have. Online gameplay adds a lot of complexity to any game, and maybe I’m not far enough but I already spent an hour and I don’t see a reason for this to be online only. Well now I kind of do, because of course, there’s a Battle Pass and a cosmetic store. As much as I enjoy the game, I still have to call this out because there’s no reason for that, and it’s probably the only reason this game is forced to be online only. It would have been nice to see an offline-only character for people who don’t care about the MMO aspects because there are none.

Pick this up if you want a Pokemon game but also to be able to play it online. There is supposed to be co-op available here, and the MMO isn’t horrible, I just don’t understand why the game needs it. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited to play more of this game. There’s just something that works well with the Pokemon formula and works well with TemTem in the same way

If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/Sx8Q4qAQKiU

The combat system is great, that alone would award this game five stars.
Shame it comes packed with FOMO ingame store on an alredy 40ish dollar game with a battle pass. That wouldn't be a problem but any new content goes directly to the cash store, that makes the current ingame activity rewards dull, as they award only generic currency, mounts and cool things are strictly reserved to the ingame cash store. While the combat is awesome it does get old fast as there are no new Temtems or significant meta shakeups.

I begin playing since the release on steam early acess and transfer my save to PS5 later, its great experience on the main campain but for a casual/non-tryhard player is difficult to recomend this game, in every aspect temtem does something new in the genre of monster taming but the MMO aspect introduces things thats ruins the replaybility like: paid for fast travel, paid for doing raids that if only one person quits everyone can't complete the raid anymore, mandatory dojo battle rematches with competitive gameplay it takes a lot of time to build a competitive team and you have to throw away your current team to focus only the meta tems to do the most of activities of post-game, that way it looks like the player is punished for not using the meta tryhard teams.

Temtem is a game that has some very good aspects but does not focus enough on them and instead spreads itself too thin trying to be something its not.

The battle system in this game and the tems themselves are very interesting, no battle is a cakewalk but rarely do they ever feel too difficult. This is helped a lot by an excellent level curve and islands being broken up by type to help players learn the new type matchups if coming from other games like Pokemon. The game is also visually pleasing with its simple but effective art style and 3d world.

Unfortunately temtem also tries to be an MMO and this is where it starts to fall apart for me. Firstly I am not a fan of MMOs to begin with so perhaps I am a bit biased but it really does feel like temtem has the worst aspects of MMOs, being poor/uninteresting side quests and overly wordy dialogue, without any of the benefits of a true MMO. The single player campaign also goes on far too long, it took me 50 hours to beat, a monster catching game does not need to be that long imo.

I am interested to see what this team can do next with a bit more focus and clarity on their project and goal. There are no plans to add more temtems/story updates to the game, which is not very MMO like but there is plenty of post game content at the moment for people who are enjoying the game.

for context, ive been playing temtem since the official public beta launch in 2020, and i really loved it back then. ive felt very comfortable keeping my rating for it a 5/5 for a very long time. the passion these devs have for this game can be felt oozing out of every design, every city, every temtem, very rarely do i find a pokemon-like that feels so well crafted and lovingly produced. the battle mechanics are easy to understand but hard to master, just like pokemon itself. so why did i drop the rating by 2 stars?

simply put, i just am not pleased with how temtem handled its launch. the game now has a battle pass, called the tamer pass, which lasts for roughly 3 months and it's awful. there's a regular free version of it with less rewards and a paid version with rewards for every level that you can only buy using the game's new in-game currency, novas. and, you guessed it, novas can only be bought using real money. oh, sure, you can get novas from leveling up the tamer pass, and maybe you'll EVENTUALLY get enough to buy the premium pass. the devs have stated that the premium pass will be free in the following seasons if you have already bought it prior to the beginning of said new season... but only if you actually finish the tamer pass. and that's where the big problem comes in, leveling up the tamer pass is agonizingly slow. you need 3,300 exp to level up once, and the game offers paltry sums of exp for certain tasks. defeating a wild tem gives you 6 exp, catching one gives you 10. you get exp for doing the daily mail run, usually less than 30, iirc, for doing the 4/5 AND 5/5 koish for the week, which together give a handsome amount, but that's still only once a week. there's still several activities like doing lair raids and dojo rematches that give tamer pass exp, but the main thing the devs want you to do are the weekly activities. and that's the huge problem, you don't get weekly activities until after beating the main campaign. now, granted, the devs have said themselves that the campaign was meant to played nonstop with little to no breaks in-between story missions, but im sorry. that's just not acceptable, like at all. i can meet the devs on their level with a lot of things. the best way to get pansuns early on in the games lifespan was to do freetem, which fed into the loop of catching temtem with ideal stats and breeding them into perfect tems, and releasing all the ones you don't need. i can accept that part of the game since it's fairly open ended at to how it can be approached and, although it can be a bit obtuse and weird, it's how they want you to play the game. they meet with the player halfway, and vice versa, in these regards.
so having the fucking gall to just lock the most effective way to level up the tamer pass behind the story's ending and trying to force players to rush it is just shitty. it demonstrates a lack of understanding what made the game's mechanics so interesting and engaging in the long run, and shows that the developers don't respect your time or patience. this isn't even mentioning that temtem is a really hard game, one that you'll most likely need to grind for on several occasions, be that for levels or TVs (this game's equivalent to EVs.)

i say all of this out of love and respect for the game, because i really do think it's great and engaging, but the tamer's pass has left a real sour taste in my mouth, and makes me feel as though the devs don't actually care about their playerbase, despite what they've shown in the past.