A Rickdiculously shallow Pokemon imitator.
Pocket Mortys has a strong first act. The minute I begin to play, I’m drawn in by the faithful visual design and writing that mirror the quirks of the hilarious Adult Swim animated series. But it plays its hand very early on, and once I’d burned through the first few hours, it was disappointing to find Pocket Mortys is little more than a diluted Pokémon imitator.
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Drawing heavily from the episode where the eponymous duo meets several alternate-dimension versions of themselves, Pocket Mortys cleverly turns the concept into a game about collecting Mortys separated from their Ricks, which means we see dozens of goofy variations on Morty’s individual design. Some Mortys have three eyes while others have none, some sport beards and hippie garb, and others are horrible test subjects or Cronenbergian nightmares. It keeps you guessing.
Each Morty plays practically identically.
However, once you catch Morty variations and use them battle, their similar move sets and a limited number of different base types cause each Morty to practically play identically, despite different names for their abilities. A strong attack might be called Brand when used by a sandwich board-wearing Morty, whereas a near-feral Scruffy Morty would use Slam, but the animations remain the same for attacks and statistic modifiers, robbing them of recognizable personality.
Attempting to ape the Pokémon elemental types, Mortys are also assigned a rock, paper, or scissors “type” with weaknesses and strengths. It’s competent, but disappointingly shallow in its lack of options and strategy – it’s more of a parody of the classic game mechanic than an interesting implementation of it.
Most of the animated series’ in-jokes and references show up in the inventory items, where supplies like a Poke Ball or HP potion are replaced with a Turbulent Juice tube, Plutonium and Serum injections, and specialized items like the instant-win Mr. Meeseeks Box and stat-boosting Mega Seeds. Many characters have cameos and recurring appearances, including Birdperson and the Council of Ricks. Dialogue between characters largely captures the tone of the show, with Rick’s flippant and dismissive cynicism playing against Morty’s unbridled anxiety and supporting characters maintaining their own identities.
In its best moments, Pocket Mortys has a similar feel and tone to its source material.
The larger issue, however, is one often found in licensed mobile games: there’s very little connective tissue between everything happening, leaving the entire game feeling more like a best-of highlight reel of callback gags and references to the events of the show, rather than a unique and original experience. In its best moments, Pocket Mortys has a similar feel and tone to its source material, but these are too thinly dispersed between disconnected jokes to give it any sort of lasting effect.
This often left me wondering who exactly Pocket Mortys is for. It references the jokes and teases its own flair on occasion throughout, but everything found within is essentially a re-hash of jokes and situations already covered in the Adult Swim show. The use of different Mortys spread across dimensions was clever at first, but quickly becomes about as interesting as stumbling across a Rattata or Magikarp. It borrows from the Pokémon games in virtually every conceivable way, from the art design down to the use of “Pathetic!” in place of “It’s not very effective…” in battle, but none of its Pokémon-inspired aspects are as deep or well-developed as that of Nintendo’s classic franchise. It’s one prolonged joke remaining competent enough to be mildly enjoyable throughout, but loses powerful momentum early on.
As licensed games go, Pocket Mortys cashes in on the Rick and Morty universe in ways clever enough to keep it from being a cynical money-grabbing disaster. It occasionally makes clever use of its source material through references and in-jokes, but all of the callbacks in the world don’t make up for mechanics that’re a pale shadow of Pokémon, without enough original ideas or even new comedy to make it into an experience capable of standing on its own.
