Anode heart is a solo indie dev project that is inspired by the classic digimon world games and tries to bring those into a modern light with new creatures and world to explore. The solo dev of this actually made a pokemon fangame called Pokemon Empyreon I believe which I had actually played and thought it was pretty good and I was impressed with what I saw of this game and heard of it from the monster catching/taming community.

To make a long review short, Anode Heart is a very good game. Theres a lot to like, it does manage to bring that classic digimon world feel to a modern setting by removing a lot of the obscurity and required guide reading but still keeping a lot of mechanical depth for those who want to dive into it but not requiring it to beat the game. Theres a whole breeding system for min maxing your tamas (the creatures) and theres stuff around swapping moves around to make illegal movesets, I didn't need to touch any of that to be able to beat the game, which has a decent ebb and flow of patches of difficulty and some patches where its a bit easy, that probably comes down to how well you can come to grips with its reboot system, I've played digimon games before and its basically the same as those so I was fine but for newbies it could require some learning but its not difficult, just different to other games like pokemon.

The battle system is quite interesting, at first it might seem a bit odd or obtuse but it actually reminds me a lot of the digimon tcg system. I'm sure other games have it but basically your moves have a power amount and most have extra effects etc like pokemon, and along with a set "pp" number, they also have a value where once you use up x amount of value then the turn swaps to the opponent and that value can overflow giving your opponent more value to use on their turn, so it adds a layer of strategy which I liked.

I do have some grips though. The first one being around the story. Its not a bad story by any means but I do think all of the jargon and terminology isn't really required, made it a bit hard to follow who was what at different points even if I understood the overarching story. My other grip is that unlike digimon, very few tamas here seem to have branching evolution paths. I think I only found one during my playthrough and discovered my starter also had one but I'm not sure if all starters do or just mine, and even then I had built my team around my starters original form so I wasn't going to swap it but maybe others would. I would have like more branching evolutions since thats a big appeal of digimon for me over something linear like this and pokemon.

But overall, if you liked classic digimon world or even just want a new semi open world monster catching game thats different to the usual pokemon inspired games, I would absolutely recommend Anode Heart and I look forward to seeing what this developer does next.