Fossil Fighters: Champions Review
Fossil Fighters: Champions expands upon the original 2009 Fossil Fighters with even more content. More fossils and more vivosaurs offers hours of collection and combat, where you’ll dig up new fossils and test their mettle against fellow fighters. The game earns points for originality, but the formula can quickly become a chore.
The story focuses on a young kid trying to become a fossil fighter like the famous Joe Wildwest. Working your way up the ranks of the Caliosteo Cup, you’ll make friends and learn how to be courageous in the face of adversity. It’s a cheesy story, sure, but it’s meant to be kid friendly, not unlike a Saturday morning cartoon–it doesn’t really have wide appeal but it’s a cute story nonetheless. There are a couple of interesting moments but the game tends to telegraph its plot points well ahead of time; you’re not going to play this game for the story, you’re going to play it for the action.
Use a hammer and drill to clean fossils, but be careful not to break any bones.
The gameplay is essentially similar to Pokémon: you find and collect creatures called vivosaurs so that you can battle them against other fossil collectors. Fossil Fighters, however, puts its own unique spin on the genre by having you unearth and clean fossils like a paleontologist before you can revive them and use them to fight. Each vivosaur, barring a few exceptions, has four bones for you to find–a head, body, arms, and legs–and the more bones a vivosaur has the stronger they’ll be. Digging up fossils proves to be a clever and addictive way of discovering new creatures and strengthening your own; the touch screen is put to perfect use as you tap and chisel away at rocks to unearth the precious bones trapped within. Depending on how well you excavate the bones, the vivosaur will be stronger or weaker, giving you good incentive to work carefully but also quickly.
However, the process of cleaning fossils loses its luster after a while. There are over one hundred vivosaurs in the game, meaning hundreds of individual bones to find, but digging up fossils, bringing them back to the laboratory, and methodically cleaning them soon feels like work rather than fun. It doesn’t help that it’s a fairly slow process, and there’s always the chance of failure or finding a dud. When you have a couple dozen fossils to clean every twenty minutes, the game ends up feeling tedious and a little boring. Cleaning fossils is a unique and fun mechanic, an ideal mini-game, but it doesn’t quite work as the backbone of the entire game.
Create a balanced team of vivosaurs to battle your way to victory.
Fossil Fighters has a unique battle system as well. You can bring three vivosaurs into combat at once and arrange them on a hexagonal grid that best suits them–i.e. long-range fighters in the back and close-range fighters up front. Vivosaurs in the back can also impart bonuses on allies or penalties on enemies–they may not always seem important but managing bonuses can have a real impact for meticulous players. Yet as far as battle systems go, Fossil Fighters errs on the side of simplicity. Each vivosaur has unique abilities and attacks, certainly, but as a whole battles are actually rather easy. The most basic amount of strategy will see you through the handful of required battles in the game. This is another effect of focusing the game on fossil cleaning, but true battles make up only a fraction of the game, and when these few fights are simple and occasionally dull, the whole game feels slow and lacks spark. And finally, leveling up your vivosaurs is a slow process, so despite having a wide variety of creatures to collect and choose from, it’s just as easy to stick with the same ones over and over to ensure you’re working with your best team–a little counter-intuitive to the whole fossil collection concept.
You can use either buttons or the touch screen to control Fossil Fighters, though both could be a little easier to manage. Obviously you have to use the stylus for cleaning fossils, but for walking around and interacting with people, the D-pad and buttons feel more natural. In battles, it’s a mixed bag of both; both have their advantages when selecting attacks and manipulating the battlefield. Like many games you’ll be switching back and forth between stylus and buttons to suit the situation.
Explore forests, volcanoes, and snowfields to find all manner of fossils.
The graphics aren’t breaking any new ground but they look good, presenting a variety of environments to explore as well as charming character models and ferocious yet adorable vivosaurs. The 3D scenery has a good amount of detail though it tends to highlight how pixelated everything truly is, and as a result can look somewhat grainy. Cutscenes look snazzy with fully rendered 3D action scenes, though these are generally brief and few in number. The soundtrack is peppy and typical of a cheery adventure, but most of time time you aren’t likely to notice it. The music is truly forgettable and tends to fall into the background.
If you are able to power through cleaning hundreds of fossils, there are hours and hours of replay value at your finger tips here. Not only that, you could easily restart the game and use an entirely different set of vivosaurs with a variety of different attacks and abilities. Playing through once you’re likely to barely scratch the surface of how many fossils and vivosaurs you can experiment with. It’s a massive time sink, though, and it’s not always rewarding, but for dedicated fossil fighters, this game could last for months.
Fossil Fighters: Champions makes good use of a unique and interesting premise, but goes a little overboard on the fossil excavation. So much focus on fossil cleaning makes the game trudge along and is downright dull at times–a little more balance between cleaning and battles would have done wonders for the game. Even with a somewhat shallow battle system, Fossil Fighters: Champions has its addictive moments, just not enough to maintain momentum throughout the entire adventure.
Rating: 
