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The best Pokémon games 2021 – Which one should you buy?
Ash, Pikachu and his pals have featured in plenty of games over the years, but which is best?
Pokémon Snap is the latest title to be added to the mountain of Pokémon games, and with eight generations worth of creatures to collect across dozens of options, it's becoming an increasingly daunting task to pick the ultimate one to play.
The "pocket monster" franchise has stretched across 25 years of gaming, movies, TV shows, and trading cards and has entertained all generations of gamers, whether you played the black-and-white originals like Yellow, or ventured out into the real world to catch them all on your smartphone with Pokémon Go.
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At Digital Spy, we've been big fans of Pikachu since day dot, so we're well-placed to help you work out which games you need to get to catch them all.
Despite there being 893 Pokémon stretched across 122 games, there are a few that truly stand out from the pack, particularly if you've got a Nintendo Switch to hand.
All the latest games are releasing on the portable games console, and it looks like future titles will be available on it too, so you're going to need to pick one of those up to play anything that comes out in the next few years.
The games have evolved – pun intended – quite drastically over the years, improving from the top-down, turn-based adventure we saw from the '90s into a large-scale, open-world hunt for your favourite characters. And for mobile gamers, Pokémon Go got us out and about on the hunt for digital monsters in the real world using augmented reality to pelt Pokéballs in public.
Older gamers might wax lyrical about their time spent snapping up photos of their favourite Pokémon on the original Nintendo 64 game from 1999. Now, modern players can enjoy collecting pictures of these playful monsters in their natural habitat on the Nintendo Switch.
This tranquil, on-rails course in photography is about as adorable as it gets for a Pokémon game, tasking you with coaxing out the untamed wildlife into cute positions in which to "capture them" on film, we guess you must have run out of Pokéballs at this point.
It works much like a safari adventure, where each level will send you on a comfortingly slow rollercoaster ambling around a gallery of scenes where you can get a shot of Pokémon from all eight generations.
You accrue points for getting multiple monsters in the frame at once, or catching them in a particularly adorable pose. You can use items to manipulate the world around you and set them up for the best pictures, and it's all rather delightful.
Available on Nintendo Switch from Nintendo, Argos, and Currys.
The first major eighth-generation games to come to the Switch, Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield arrived with a new brand of gameplay in the form of the series' first open-world area.
In the Wild Area, hunt for Pokémon hiding in the tall grass or just roaming around the land, battling them in the hopes of adding them to your collection.
Sword and Shield also added Dynamax battles, which are huge fights against towering Pokémon the size of skyscrapers. Abilities are enhanced to biblical proportions and you'll have to change your tactics to defeat these titan-sized pocket monsters.
Available on Nintendo Switch from GAME, Nintendo, and Argos.
Only on Nintendo Switch, these HD remakes to 1998's smash-hit Pokémon Yellow return to the original generation of 151 Pokemon (with your starter Pokemon determined by which game you bought, so either Eevee or Pikachu), but utilise the tech from the new console to enhance the gameplay.
Use the built-in gyroscope on the Switch Joy-cons to aim and throw your Pokéballs at wild Pokémon, and you can even pair up your game to your Go account, transferring all the monsters you’ve captured between the two to improve your collection.
For many gamers, it will scratch an itch. Available on Nintendo Switch.
Nintendo Pokémon Brilliant Diamond
Now that we've covered all the games currently available, let's move on to the future of the franchise. Due later in 2021 as part of the 25th anniversary, we'll get HD remakes of Diamond and Pearl, an upgrade to the older editions similar to HeartGold and SoulSilver or Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire.
These will shift the focus away from the top-down perspective and have the camera sitting over your shoulder again as you explore the fictional island of Sinnoh.
There's not much new here in terms of gameplay: collect Pokémon and battle them in turn-based fights, though this game won't have any creatures from the fifth-eighth generations.
We have few details on how this game will play out or what to expect (we don't even have an official release date yet), but if you were a fan of the 2006 originals, you're likely going to enjoy jumping back into that world with a shiny HD facelift applied.
Available in 2021 on Nintendo Switch.
Have you played through several years of Pokémon games and just wished you could have one secure place to keep all your precious Poké-pals so they don’t get up to mischief?
Pokémon Home on the Nintendo Switch acts as a kind of digital vault for your collection, housing your Pokémon in the cloud and letting you trade between certain games.
Say you've caught an especially rare Gyarados on your travels around your local park on Pokémon Go and you want to level up that bad boy for a fight in Pokémon Sword or Shield. You can pop this freshly-caught creature in your hub and analyse them, add them to your Pokédex (your online almanac for all the characters you’ve seen in your adventures) and then transfer them in an instant.
This only works for compatible titles, unfortunately, so you can’t pick up Pokémon from the current eight generations and drop them into your old-school '90s games.
To see which games are compatible with Pokémon Home, visit Nintendo's handy article.
Available for free on Nintendo Switch, iOS and Android.
If all these turn-based games are getting rather same-y to you, it's probably because they are. The Pokémon franchise has been screaming for a fresh take on its combat for years, but we might have finally stumbled on a winner with Unite.
Following a similar pattern to popular MOBAs (massive online battle arenas) like League of Legends or World of Warcraft Online, this game sees you take control of individual Pokémon in a 5-vs-5 team-based fight for control online with other players.
You'll pick your chosen monster and work with your team to take over points on the map, defeating "wild" computer-controlled Pokémon to gain territory and score points. The more points you get, the more you can upgrade and evolve your character, making them even more powerful.
It's a significant shift in focus from the more traditional gameplay we have seen from other games, and we're excited to see what the future of the franchise looks like.
We don't have an official release date yet, though we know that there have been a few beta tests across Android and iOS devices in 2021 to see how it works, and it appears to be a fun new direction with the potential for a competitive esport upon release.
Available in 2021 on Nintendo Switch, Android, and iOS.
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