EvoCreo review for PC

For some reason, I’ve always been a bigger fan of Pokémon clones than of actual Pokémon games. I’ve never come close to finishing Pokémon Sun or Pokémon Shield, but I’ve put a surprising amount of hours into the likes of Nexomon and Coromon.

To this list of clones that I’ve sunk more time into than the original, you can add EvoCreo. Mind you, calling it a clone probably does the game a bit of a disservice. It originally came out on mobile more than a decade ago, and it’s successful enough that it had a sequel come out last year.

Nonetheless, whether it’s been an App Store success or not, there’s no denying that EvoCreo will feel awfully familiar if you’ve ever played an older Pokémon game. Everything about it feels like it was lifted straight out of the earliest Pokémon colour games, from the visuals to the layout of the towns to the battles. And I don’t just mean it feels “inspired by” Pokémon or anything; I’m saying that if someone were to play this blind, without knowing the title, they’d probably think they’d found a forgotten early Pokémon game.

To be fair, EvoCreo sort of tries to be a little different. It offers you the option to customize your monsters, in case you want to really focus your attacks in one direction or another. And its developers are promising that it’ll have ranked online PVP battles (albeit without any timelines), in case you’ve ever wished that Pokémon was multiplayer.

But let’s be honest, those are pretty small tweaks. EvoCreo doesn’t stray too far from the Pokémon formula, all things considered. But it also doesn’t really need to do more, either. It may be a clone, but it’s a well-made one that does everything you’d hope for from the game it’s copying. That’s not enough to break EvoCreo out of Pokémon’s shadow, but it’s enough that if you’re a PC gamer and you want to play Pokémon without owning a Nintendo system, it’ll certainly be a tolerable substitute.

Ilmfinity Studios provided us with an EvoCreo PC code for review purposes.