Critic & User Reviews
IGN Review of Bakugan
Collectible battle animals-robots-demons-creatures-cards will never cease to stop being produced it seems, and each of them is almost always carried over to multiple media types. Pokemon is obviously the biggest example of this, but Bakugan has been picking up steam as of late.
In the actual real-world game, players place large, magnetic cards on a playing surface and then attempt to roll plastic balls onto them. These balls are the Bakugan and magnetically pop open into their beast form when rolled on top of a card. Then by way of adding up various G-Power cards and through other rules, a winner in each battle is determined and that player wins a card. Once a certain number of cards are won, that player is the overall winner of the game. There's more to it than that, but that's the basic idea.
This setup works well enough, though there's a limited number of Bakugan for purchase, largely because they essentially repeat across the six different types of Bakugan (also known as Attributes). Depending upon what cards are played and what battlefield you're on, one type may provide better bonuses than another, but it seemed hard to justify having to buy what is pretty much the exact same creature six different times in order to really take advantage of this. Instead, I just pumped money into the ones I had in order to upgrade them and dealt with the situations as they came up rather than buying a whole new slew of creatures for a new tournament.
Play-wise, a few liberties were taken with the rules of the game in order to make it more exciting, but really all that happens is that you do all of this stuff to build up to a showdown between two Bakugan, and then one just runs into the other and quickly wins.
After throwing your Bakugan into the playing field, other players can try to knock it off-course while you try to steer your creature into pick-ups on the field to make your Bakugan stronger for the current match. After that, you can use any of the three Ability cards you've pre-selected to boost your Bakugan's G-Power, and then you play one of three mini-games to further raise your little guy's G-Power. These three mini-games include a lite DDR-esque timing/rhythm game, a "shooting" game where you shoot your Bakugan's Attribute symbol to gain power, and a third one where you shake the analog sticks as quickly as possible to build up G-Power.
After all of that, whichever Bakugan has more G-Power hits the other Bakugan once and the round is over. It seems to me like the game would have been more exciting if you threw your Bakugan, used an Ability card and then played a mini-game while your Bakugan were fighting, where your actions directly impacted their battle. Instead, the build-up to the battle is way longer than the actual fight and the skirmish is over in seconds. There aren't even multiple rounds where they trade blows - it's like early Mike Tyson is in the ring every time.
While the PlayStation 2 version of Bakugan is practically identical to the other console releases, it's easily the worst as the graphics can be a hindrance. Characters are low-poly takes on the folks from the other versions (which weren't great to begin with), and it's full of jaggies everywhere. However, the biggest problem is that the cards you play are so blurry that it can be impossible to read stats on some of them, especially when the background is very light.
©2009-10-23, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
In the actual real-world game, players place large, magnetic cards on a playing surface and then attempt to roll plastic balls onto them. These balls are the Bakugan and magnetically pop open into their beast form when rolled on top of a card. Then by way of adding up various G-Power cards and through other rules, a winner in each battle is determined and that player wins a card. Once a certain number of cards are won, that player is the overall winner of the game. There's more to it than that, but that's the basic idea.
This setup works well enough, though there's a limited number of Bakugan for purchase, largely because they essentially repeat across the six different types of Bakugan (also known as Attributes). Depending upon what cards are played and what battlefield you're on, one type may provide better bonuses than another, but it seemed hard to justify having to buy what is pretty much the exact same creature six different times in order to really take advantage of this. Instead, I just pumped money into the ones I had in order to upgrade them and dealt with the situations as they came up rather than buying a whole new slew of creatures for a new tournament.
Play-wise, a few liberties were taken with the rules of the game in order to make it more exciting, but really all that happens is that you do all of this stuff to build up to a showdown between two Bakugan, and then one just runs into the other and quickly wins.
After throwing your Bakugan into the playing field, other players can try to knock it off-course while you try to steer your creature into pick-ups on the field to make your Bakugan stronger for the current match. After that, you can use any of the three Ability cards you've pre-selected to boost your Bakugan's G-Power, and then you play one of three mini-games to further raise your little guy's G-Power. These three mini-games include a lite DDR-esque timing/rhythm game, a "shooting" game where you shoot your Bakugan's Attribute symbol to gain power, and a third one where you shake the analog sticks as quickly as possible to build up G-Power.
After all of that, whichever Bakugan has more G-Power hits the other Bakugan once and the round is over. It seems to me like the game would have been more exciting if you threw your Bakugan, used an Ability card and then played a mini-game while your Bakugan were fighting, where your actions directly impacted their battle. Instead, the build-up to the battle is way longer than the actual fight and the skirmish is over in seconds. There aren't even multiple rounds where they trade blows - it's like early Mike Tyson is in the ring every time.
While the PlayStation 2 version of Bakugan is practically identical to the other console releases, it's easily the worst as the graphics can be a hindrance. Characters are low-poly takes on the folks from the other versions (which weren't great to begin with), and it's full of jaggies everywhere. However, the biggest problem is that the cards you play are so blurry that it can be impossible to read stats on some of them, especially when the background is very light.
©2009-10-23, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved