Last year, The Pokémon Company released the trailer for its newest spin-off game in their long-running monster battling franchise; Pokémon UNITE. Pokémon UNITE brings Pokémon into the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre. The game is being developed by Tencent games’ TiMi Studios who have previously worked on Call of Duty: Mobile and Honor of Kings. Pokémon UNITE will be free-to-start and available on Nintendo Switch as well as Mobile, with cross-play available between platforms.
The gameplay itself is quite standard to other MOBA games. You will have an island as your arena with 2 teams of 5 starting on opposite sides. Each side will have 5 goals, or scoring areas, that you can be used to heal HP and redeem points that players build up from catching and defeating Pokémon. After a certain number of points redeemed at each goal, it will shut down and no longer be in use for the rest of the game. Every battle your Pokémon will start the match at Level 1 and as you play your Pokémon will level up and evolve, as well as develop new moves. You’ll be able to choose which moves you want, similar to how you would in the mainline games, forgetting older and less effective moves to learn stronger and more critical ones as you go. To put it simply, Pokémon UNITE is League of Legends but with a healthy dose of Pokémon mixed in. Though let’s just hope the salt of LOL doesn’t make its way into the Pokémon community.
On a recent blog post on the official Pokémon UNITE site, we have a general release window for the game. Pokémon UNITE will be coming to Nintendo Switch this July and will be available on mobile devices in September. Will you be playing? Let us know in the comments below. And check out the new cinematic trailer for Pokémon Unite.
