The past week has been a bit of a whirlwind for Pokémon Sword and Shield news, with the substantial reveal in the Pokémon Direct followed up by a look at another Gym battle, this one Water-focused, and then some more gameplay of the open-world Wild Area in the Nintendo Treehouse straight after.
On top of all that, we’ve just played it – and there are two brand spanking new Pokémon in there that are yet to be detailed.
The first is Yamper, an Electric-type Pokémon that very much resembles a corgi (you know, the breed of dog favoured by the Queen). It’s not the toughest in the world but tries its best. The one in our demo, where all Pokémon were automatically set to level 50, knew the moves Play Rough, Spark, Crunch and Wild Charge. Unfortunately we couldn’t get much more of a look at it than that as the demo had all of the menus locked off – we could only open our party to inspect it mid-battle, and were keen to get through all of the stuff available in that demo before we ran out of time.
The second we know even less about, as it was one of our opponents’ Pokémon in the Gym. This was a seemingly Dark-type, called Impidimp. It’s bright pink, looks extremely mischievous, and used Dark-type attacks before we took it out. It was also set to level 50 in the demo but again, that’s likely artificially set for the purpose of an even playing field in this very-much-vertical slice.
Anyway, as for what we actually played, we got through a roughly fifteen-minute runthrough of that Water-type gym from the latest Direct, and if you’ve been longing for a return to the old school brainteasers, you’re in luck.
This was more or less an archetypal Gym: on entering you’re greeted by the usual chirpy ‘Go get ’em Champ!’ guy, who’ll also heal your Pokémon for you to save a trip outside to the Pokémon Centre. Up ahead, a type-themed room of environmental puzzles. The puzzles here were very much classic Pokémon, too, with the task being to press buttons near big columns of water that blocked the path to switch them on or off.