Kabuto Park is a game that asks and answers the important question of “what if Pokemon had been way more literal about its bug collecting inspiration?” You’re tasked with winning 30 bug sumo matches in order to become summer champion, and you’ll do that by catching and training up the best team of three bugs. It’s the kind of simple concept you’d expect from a $5 game, but Kabuto Park really takes it the extra mile.
Let’s start with the sumo minigame. Every bug, like every Pokemon, has stats that are determined both by its species and by some random individual modifiers. Its attack determines how well it pushes during your push phase, its defense determines how well it resits enemy pushes during their phase, and its speed determines how quickly you earn AP to play cards. The three stats from your three bugs combine to set your team’s overall effectiveness, and neglecting any one of them can result in a quick loss. Defense always matters since the enemy team pushes first, but you’ll need attack to have any hope of winning. Speed often seems like the least important, but since there are cards offering stackable passive effects and large sudden pushes, clever usage of extra cards can easily swing a battle in favor of a faster but weaker team. I won’t pretend that Kabuto Park is about to become the next great esport, but it’s much deeper than you’d expect from a game like this.
Outside of battle, gameplay mostly consists of going to a location and catching bugs. There are four locations in the game that each have progressively better bugs and progressively more difficult catching mechanics, but you’ll have to unlock access to everywhere other than the first field. Once you’ve picked a location, you’re presented with a handful of search spots and have to win a quick timing minigame to catch bugs at them. You can repeat this process as many times as you like each day, and you’ll need to do it a lot if you want to complete the bug dex. Every location has its own set of bugs that expands as the game goes on, including rare and legendaries that make up for the difficulty of catching them with significantly better stats. There are even shinies, although these spawn rarely enough that you’d need to be very dedicated to be able to catch more than a couple.
Conclusion
If there’s anything to criticize about Kabuto Park, it’s that it can be a bit grindy. The most reliable way of leveling up bugs is to sell other bugs, so you’ll sometimes go through sequences of doing nothing but catching trash bugs for 10 minutes in order to grind up the EXP for the newest member of your team. But since 10 minutes still isn’t much time and you’ll have a chance of finding shinies, even that doesn’t feel like much of a dig against it. Kabuto Park is not going to blow you away and probably won’t be anyone’s game of the year, but for a $5 game, it’s pretty incredible.
Rating: 85%
Time to beat: 2 hours to complete the dex
Price: $5
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