Temtem: Early impressions of the Pokemon-like RPG

Temtem, the new Pokemon-like MMO RPG, launched in early access on Steam and we got our hands on it. This is our initial early impressions of the game after about two hours with it. In these first two hours, we managed to catch 6 Temtem, get into a bunch of battles and made our way to the town of Brical de Mar.

Your Temtem adventure starts off in the same way as your typical Pokemon adventure does - you head over to the lab and choose your starter Temtem and get introduced to your arch rival. Although we didn't experience much more of the story in the first two hours, it won't be anything groundbreaking. However, one interesting thing about Temtem is that the game contains side quests, something that is absent from most Pokemon titles.

The battle system is also different from Pokemon. Each Temtem has an energy bar that is drained after a certain move is used, with different moved requiring different levels of energy. This switches it up from Pokemon, where it was possible to spam Hyper Beam 5 times in a row. This switches up the battles and makes them more tactical. Battles are also fought 2 v 2 (which is also present in some Pokemon games although 1 v 1 is the norm).

Let's move over to how the game looks and runs. The basic art style is similar to the recent Pokemon games but in my opinion, it looks better overall. The backgrounds are colourful and well done and the animations are smooth. The attack animations especially look really good. When we were playing this, one of the first things we thought during our playthrough, was whether the next Pokemon game would include some of what Temtem has brought to the table.

One problem some hardcore Pokemon fans have had with the game is that they didn't like the design of the Temtem. In our opinion, this isn't really an issue and most of the Temtem look great.

The most interesting part of Temtem has to be the online aspects of it. Although we didn't experience much of this in our two hours with the game, it was great seeing other players going about the world.

The game is far from finished right now but what we get in eary access is a big chunk of the experience. The game has some issues, but overall, it is definitely worth a try at the moment.

With Temtem being in Early Access, there are some bugs though, although nothing too terrible. We got frozen on the menus a couple of times while trying to apply Balm on Temtem and it also froze randomly one other time during our playthrough.