Review: Digimon World Next Order (PS4)

A new Digimon game trying to deliver a completely different approach from Cyber Sleuth. Trying to be a jack of all trades but master of none and fails them all.

Visuals

The Digimon games have never been about strong visuals but this one drops the ball for sure. The Digimon are animated as far as necessary, combat looks boring and the camera is the worst. Not only that. Your digi-partners can be pretty big and get in your way. They are from the players point of view between the screen and your character blocking your view. You sometimes cannot see clearly what is in front of you.

Sound

The game got no memorable soundtrack. The opening is nice but the game did nit have anything else like it.

The sound effects are mega annoying and start becoming repetitive after 2 hours already. Same goes for battle related sound effects and chimes.

Gameplay

Annoying. That is the one word I got for it.

You are thrown right into the games world and it starts off with a not very well done tutorial. The game needs to explain quite a few things right at the beginning which is often not a good sign. Once in the village which acts as your base the first thing you need to do is to keep training your Digimon in the gym until they digivolve to their first stage. Otherwise you are to weak to do anything at all outside. Even then most enemies on the first map are still far stronger than you and knock you out in one attack.

The battle system is boring, feels unbalanced and enemies often can knock down your team in one attack if they are just one level above you.

It wants you to train them and care for them. You constantly need to watch whether they got hungry, need to poop or are injured. This heavily interferes with exploration and combat. Free exploration is barely possible because of very limited inventory space and the constant yelling from your Digimon that they want something which forces you to stop and care for them. Often resulting in either spending additional items or changing course to a public toilet in the field (no joke).

There is a constant back and forth. The day and night rhythm stops you from playing too and the boring training room which is mandatory. You spend a lot of time there training your digimon but it is boring as hell and doesn’t change at all.

Story

The story is nothing super creative either. It starts of harmless and begins to develop into something much more serious.

Amargosa

Ben's Chaos Dungeon